#LAWYER BUSINESS

[sully-s]

Lawyer Boys Doodles

[rowanisawriter]

Odysseus takes in breath after breath of stale city air. Even this high up with the constant breeze, he can still smell the lingering scent of cigarettes that hovers around Diomedes, and the packed and condensed smell of people and concrete buildings and the way rain smells when it’s a day or two behind but clings to brick, to stone, to trees and leaves, an echo of freshness behind the faint hint of decay.

He leans against the half wall, looking down at the lights of the evening. The sky is like spilled ink. Not a single star breaks through the invisible dome of light pollution.

“Thought I was going to die in there,” Diomedes says beside him, his cigarette slowly smoking in between his fingers.

“I’m glad that was so amusing to you,” Odysseus says.

“Come on, it was funny.” Diomedes nudges him with a massive shoulder. “It was. Achilles hitting Agamemnon was funny.”

“I think he got some blood on my shirt.”

.

thank you @deadbaguette for this perfect art of a scene from my iliad lawyer AU, synergy! they look just as stressed and overworked as i imagined lol

[dewsgremlin]

Aether: bug, did you eat my chocolate pudding?

Phantom: no.

Aether: Oh, you don't? But then why do you have a spot in the corner of your mouth that looks very suspiciously like chocolate pudding?

Phantom: I won't say anything without my lawyer.

- Rain appearing next to them -

Rain: Hello, I'm his lawyer. I don't know exactly what this is about, but my client has done nothing wrong. Nothing at all.

Aether: ...

Rain: He doesn't even know how to do something wrong.

Aether, pointing on the chocolate stain: He ate my chocolate pudding. The evidence is even still on the corner of his mouth.

Rain, licking over Phantoms mouth: I see no evidence.

Aether: ...

Swiss: hey guys, what's going on here?

Aether: Just Phantom's laywer destroying evidence...

[pinkacademiaprincess]

fall lookbook: business casual🍂💼🎀👩‍💻

if you can't tell, my business casual style icons include lorelai gilmore, rachel zane, elle greenaway, rachel green, etc. 💌

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

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

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

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

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[whipbogard]

My lawyer gearing up to defend me in court 🫣🥰

[butterflyscribbles]

The fact that I fell back into the Ace Attorney pit right as the Apollo trilogy remaster was released is just a sign it was meant to be💼✨

[boarloved-art]

i like the car movies a lot.......

[sciencelings-speaks]

I love that even with all the lengths Stronghart went through to hide Kazuma's identity (using a mask to hide his eyes and a cloak to cover everything else, banning him from even speaking), the minute Ryunosuke saw him for the first time he suspected it. From his posture alone, they knew each other for about a year and were separated for like eight months and Ryunosuke could still identify his bbf from the way he stood like... Kazuma lost his memory, his identity, his... everything and Ryunosuke still clocked it, even though he literally thinks Kazuma is dead, that the prosecutor's masked apprentice is the whole reason he's even there at all.

Literally what else could Stronghart have done to hide Kazuma's presence from Ryunosuke, he did as much as he could but still Ryunosuke felt it immediately. This feels gayer than most of the yaoi I've come across, this is a major plot point in a romantic drama, this can't not be a trope in one of the kdramas my dad likes to watch on Netflix.

[ddanosaur]

fitzroy maplecourt going to law school now that’s what i call an ACE ATTORNEY

[bumblingbabooshka]

Janeway doesn't need a therapist when she gets back to the alpha quadrant she just needs Tuvok to tell her [in detail] the psychological observations he's made about her over the past 11 years and she can go from there <- Untrue but much more likely for her to agree to

[gojoest]

little update on my love life hsksjsk

i ghosted and then sb’ed the lawyer guy on ig bc turns out he’s friends with that one psycho man i met a few months ago. i think the latter i only mentioned meeting but never gave tea on the fallout here. it was all fun and games until it wasn’t. he basically tried to be alpha with me and i was not having it LOL but each time i blocked him in one place he found another means to reach me but his options were limited to begin with so eventually he gave up and stopped bothering me. but like, man. digging up all of my socials just to tell me things like “you’re so cold to me whenever we’re not together physically. far from the eye, far from the heart — is this your game?” was the last straw. NO SIR I AM A HORRID TEXTER i don’t play mind games 😭 i just kept blocking him without even bothering to give a reply, it probably pissed him off sm LOL which wasn’t my intention, i just thought there was no point in wasting my time and energy on a man like that, i didn’t even want to clear out the misunderstanding like hello i have a life and ur not my priority 😭 his petty male ego was def hurt, what a dick

so when i found out they were friends my brain went ultra dramatic, i thought maybe the lawyer guy was a setup from the very start and that it was a carefully crafted method by the psycho guy to approach me again. naturally i got paranoid and that story is now over, nothing weird’s happened after that, thankfully

and— you rmr the hq guy? yeah, we’re forced to keep a professional relationship rn bc he often visits the office for work related purposes. today he came. twice. first for work, and then — to bring me sweet treats 😭 out of the blue, like way after his business was done 😭 we hadn’t talked after what happened last time so what’s this now 😭 why can’t men read the room 😭

[fall0utmind]

I just read your comment about Marc lawyer au and i have an idea...

Marc is a law student, Vale is a lawyer, they meet in court (not got much more atm 😅)

Thoughts?

Oh my god yes??

Like vale is this hot shot lawyer who everyone is terrified of in court and marc is the new law student who's shadowing or interning or something (I don't know how law school works, I'm a psychologist lol)

Anyways so marc starts interning and everyone is like DAMN he's the next Vale, cause he's so fucking good at what he does and everyone is like super impressed.

(Bonus points for dani and dovi mentions as other lawyers/ his supervisors)

Anyways so eventually he meets Vale. And marc is super excited but tryna play it cool cause that's like the best lawyer ever. And Vale is like wtf I don't wanna meet some kid, and all annoyed etc

They meet and vales like huh, firstly kid is beautiful (ifkyk) and secondly kinda endearing but fuck it's hot when he starts lawyering and is all intense and says things that will either be the best argument ever or will blow up in everyone's faces.

Cue pining from both sides (but vale is in denial) and eventual fuckong (cause let's be real)

THEN they have a case against each other or some shit? Idk how it would work cause one of them would have to be defence and one prosecution and I think they're separate jobs?? Maybe?? But yeah, then there's like a mirror or 2015 divirce era.

Eeekkkk

Another bonus- both of them in like full 3 piece suits 🤤🤤🤤

[thebrazenshame]

the way my character can just Walk into some courtroom and pretend to be a lawyer really says a lot about FLondon society

hey timothy the fucking director of the railway wants to represent you for your murder trial. no she doesnt have credentials. good luck.

[doomspaniels]

Rules Lawyer Tristan has never been told he can't counter-surf THIS counter 🤣

I am simply putting stuff out of his reach. It's not important to make him not counter-surf right here right now, and... it's funny... PT has apparently given him abs of steel, because he just stands up there investigating every little sniff on our stuff and the hotel stuff on the table Behold, a [small] man!

It's a poor substitute for Sniff Patrol, but at least Tristan gets some variety of scents.

[manitapaleta]

mommy? sorry. mommy?? ...sorry.

S2 milfs!!! and Marco hehe