#Machine for brick production

[snpcmachine]

BMM410: Single brick machine with multiple features

SnPC Machines: Factory of bricks on wheel

SnPC Machines, a factory of brick on wheel in Haryana, India is manufacturing mobile brick making machine i.e. BMM160, BMM310, BMM410 which produce bricks while moving on wheel just like a normal land vehicle does. These machines are based on "single machine with multi features". Different features available in these machines are:

Easy to handle

Durable

Eco-friendly

Easy to handle

Budget-friendly

Demands minimum labor

freedom to produce brick anywhere, anytime and in any qnatity

Fast brick production compared to other methods Make it soon to order your own brick making machine from SnPC Machines, India.

[claybrickmachine]

Buy Your own Clay Brick making machine today and be a pro in construction world

SnPC Machines: Factory of brick on wheel

Clay Brick Making Machine: SnPC Machines India Introduced The New Age Technology In The Global Brick Field Like Mobile Brick Making Machine. Worlds 1st Fully Automatic Brick Making Machine Which Can Lay Down The Bricks While The Vehicle Is On Move. Reference Machines4u An Australian Magazine Is Telling About The Mobile Brick Making Machine.

[deus-ex-mona]

my morbid curiosity has been piqued…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[kikizoshi]

Fucking hate Apple.

[laxmienterprises]

Egg Tray Making Machine | Paper Egg tray Making Machine

Laxmi Enterprises is the leading manufacturer, retailer,importer, macking machine, Egg tray machine, Paper plats machine etc.

[businesssinfo]

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHILE BUYING FLY ASH BRICK-MAKING MACHINE.

INTRODUCTION

The use of fly ash bricks has gained significant popularity in the construction industry due to their eco-friendly and cost-effective nature. Fly ash brick-making machines play a crucial role in the production of these bricks. However, with various models and manufacturers available in the market, choosing the right machine can be a daunting task. This article will guide you through the essential factors to consider while choosing the right fly ash brick making machine manufacturers and buying the right fly ash brick-making machine.

1. PRODUCTION CAPACITY:

One of the primary considerations is the production capacity of the machine. Evaluate the number of bricks you need to produce daily or weekly based on your construction projects. Choose a machine with a production capacity that meets your requirements without compromising on quality.

2. AUTOMATION LEVEL

The level of automation in the fly ash brick-making machine can significantly impact the efficiency and labour costs. Fully automatic machines by automatic fly ash brick making machine manufacturers can handle various tasks, from material feeding to brick formation and stacking, with minimal human intervention. On the other hand, semi-automatic machines may require more manual labour. Consider your budget and workforce availability to decide the appropriate automation level.

3. BRICK SIZE AND SHAPES

Different construction projects may require different brick sizes and shapes. Ensure that the machine you choose is capable of producing the specific brick dimensions you need. Some machines allow customization of moulds to produce different shapes, providing versatility for your projects.

4. QUALITY OF BRICKS:

The quality of the fly ash bricks is vital for their structural integrity and durability. Inspect the machine's technology and features that ensure consistent and high-quality brick production. Look for machines with advanced mixing and compaction mechanisms, as well as uniform curing facilities.

5. POWER CONSUMPTION

Fly ash brick-making machines run on electricity, and it's essential to consider their power consumption. Opt for machines that are energy-efficient to keep operational costs in check. Lower power consumption not only saves money but also reduces the environmental impact.

6. DURABILITY AND MAINTENANCE

A reliable and sturdy fly ash brick-making machine can withstand the rigors of continuous operation and heavy workload. Check the build quality, materials used, and reputation of the manufacturer for reliability. Additionally, inquire about the maintenance requirements and availability of spare parts to ensure smooth operation and longevity.

7. COST AND BUDGET

The cost of fly ash brick-making machines can vary significantly based on their features and capabilities. At times based on the batching plant systems, set a budget that aligns with your production needs and consider the long-term return on investment. Avoid compromising on quality for cheaper options, as it may lead to higher maintenance costs and lower-quality bricks.

8. MANUFACTURER REPUTATION

Research the reputation of the manufacturer or supplier before making a purchase. Look for customer reviews, testimonials, and references to gauge their credibility. A reputable manufacturer is more likely to provide quality machines and reliable customer support.

CONCLUSION

Investing in a fly ash brick-making machine is a significant decision that requires careful consideration of various factors. By evaluating the production capacity, automation level, brick quality, power consumption, and other crucial aspects, you can select a machine that meets your construction needs efficiently. Prioritize durability, reliability, and the reputation of the manufacturer to ensure a successful and sustainable brick-making operation. With the right machine, you can produce high-quality fly ash bricks while contributing to a greener and more sustainable construction industry.

Visit our Website: bennyenterprises.net for further information.

[phantomrose96]

At this point, after this has happened a dozen times, why the hell is anyone pushing any update that wide that fast. They didn't try 10 nearby computers first? Didn't do zone by zone? Someone needs to be turbo fired for this and a law needs to get written.

The "this has happened a dozen times" really isn't correct. This one is unprecedented.

But yes the "how the hell could it go THAT bad?" is the thing everyone with even a little software experience is spinning over. Because it is very easy to write code with a bug. But that's why you test aggressively, and you roll out cautiously - with MORE aggressive testing and MORE cautious rollout the more widely-impacting your rollout would be.

And this is from my perspective in product software, where my most catastrophic failure could break a product, not global systems.

Anti-malware products like Crowdstrike are highly-privileged, as in they have elevated trust and access to parts of the system that most programs wouldn't usually have - which is something that makes extremely thorough smoke-testing of the product way MORE important than anything I've ever touched. It has kernel access. This kind of thing needs testing out the wazoo.

I can mostly understand the errors that crop up where like, an extremely old machine on an extremely esoteric operating system gets bricked because the test radius didn't include that kind of configuration. But all of Windows?

All of Windows, with a mass rollout to all production users, including governments?

There had to be layers upon layers of failures here. Especially given how huge Crowdstrike is. And I really want to know what their post-mortem analysis ends up being because for right now I cannot fathom how you end up with an oversight this large.

[headspace-hotel]

Crafting automation???

Nether-based gold farms are much more usable now because the gold nuggets could be converted into ingots or blocks possibly instead of having to do so manually

guardian farms directly making prismarine

Mega builds are significantly easier because e.g. if you want to build something that takes 3 shulks of deepslate tiles you don't have to go through the crafting recipe for EVERY stack of deepslate several times to get to tiles.

Configuring tnt duper cobble generators to make stone bricks, chiseled stone, mossy cobblestone, is now possible

Automated conversion of copper ingots to copper blocks is honestly a game changer because copper is so time consuming to work with.

Iron can be crafted into buckets which means you could theoretically hook up an iron farm to a farm that uses buckets to collect stuff and fully automate the whole thing...

AUTOMATED FOOD PRODUCTION?

automated bamboo farm that automatically converts the bamboo to blocks

AUTOMATED DYE FARM. AUTOMATED DYEING MACHINE

you could have multiple stacked tiers of farms that take the raw materials through a whole process to get to the end point.

okay i'm actually really excited about this

[sayruq]

The Turkish Ministry of Trade said on Tuesday it will no longer send to Israel items in 54 categories spanning iron and steel products, jet fuel, construction equipment, machines, cement, granites, chemicals, pesticides and bricks. “Israel continues to flagrantly violate international law and ignores the international community,” it said in a statement. “This decision will remain in place until Israel declares a ceasefire immediately and allows adequate and uninterrupted flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

[snpcmachine]

SnPC Machines BMM410 with a production more than 25K bricks in just 01 hour.

Brick making machine: BMM410

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BMM410 is a fully automatic red clay brick making machine by Snpc companies which has greatly revolutionize brick production due to its high speed and less raw material requirement. It can produce 24000 brick/hr with a reduction of 45%cost and natural resources like water, it requires only one-third of water for brick making as required during manual production. This machines requires a fuel consumption of 16-18 liters/hour for its working. Raw material needed for its working can be mud, clay or mixture of clay and fly ash. This machine is widely used by itta Bhatta, brick making factories or brick kiln and clay brick manufacturers around the globe. Different types of brick produced by this machines are clay brick, fly ash brick etc. Different types of brick this machine can produce are red bricks, clay bricks, fly ash brick. This machine give kiln owner to produce brick independently anywhere anytime. This machine consumer 16-18 liters of fuel for its working. Other mobile brick making machines are BMM-160, BMM-310, SBM-180 with different production capacities. Consumers can order from any state, Country or can visit us for their own satisfaction. Thankyou for visiting us. 8826423668

[silassinclair]

Introduction!!

Yandere Ghost x Reader

CW// Suicidal Thoughts, Paranormal Activity, Murder Mention

My other yand OC Maddox was a hit with ya’ll so here’s a short introduction of a new oc!! Hope you like him as much as I do. This is gonna be very boring because it’s an introduction but I’ll make a oneshot right after this one!!

Masterlist!!

“This key unlocks every door in the manor. Except the door to the attic for some reason, but there’s nothing of importance up there. Apparently it’s just some old junk the first owner left.” The agent said with a tight lipped smile. Her matte red lipstick was as bright as a stop sign.

Taking the key from her hand you’re surprised to feel how heavy it is. “Thank you.” You mutter.

“All the legalities are settled so she’s all yours. I recommend blasting that ivy off the side wall of the house though. The roots can mess up the brick.” The agent adds.

“Alright, I appreciate the tip.” You say and shut the door in her face, leaving you alone in your new home.

Maria was a total pain in the ass, like all people who work with selling things. Oh and for the record, you like the ivy that grows on the side of your new home. Makes it look pretty and natural. Anyways, her being gone was like a breath of fresh air. All was good now that you finally had a place to call home.

Your Grandfather died and in the will he left you his summer home in Italy. It was a grand manor that was located on a hilltop surrounded by forrest. It was perfect for your hermit self. Never in your life would you imagine leaving the states to come live in Italy but here you were. After all the manor was handed to you on a silver platter, the offer would be foolish to refuse.

There was nothing for you in the states. Your life was miserable, draining, and filled with nothing but painful repetition. Being worked like a machine and stepped on like a doormat. Having a horrid and overly possessive ex boyfriend who was a serial cheater didn’t help either. You were so close to ending your miserable existence until a woman named Maria gave you a call.

And now you were here, standing in the foyer of your new home. Some work would need to be done. Floors needed polishing, corners dusting, windows wiping. Maybe you should make a checklist?

"This is gonna be a long day.." You think to yourself.

"There she is again. She must be the new owner." I think to myself as I watch the young woman clean the floor.

The past owner, Lorenzo, must have passed away and put the ownership of the manor into this girl's hands. It has been a while since I’ve seen the old man. But did he have to put my home in the hands of some uncultured American? I find this terribly irresponsible of him, I mean look at her!

She's using a bleach based product on the hardwood! Lorenzo was a good owner of the Verona manor. He hired staff to keep it well maintained and he rarely ever visited. But this girl... she's an utter buffoon. Before she can torture the hardwood any longer I swiftly hover behind her and move the bottle a few feet away from her while she isn't looking.

"Huh?" When she reaches for the bottle she finds it has moved away. I snicker at her confused reaction.

"It was just right here..."

She reaches over and grabs it again but before she does I kick it, sending it flying across the foyer and hitting the front door.

“Any minute now she’ll run away screaming, she won’t even look back.” I think to myself with a devious grin.

But when I hover in front of her I only see an annoyed expression on her face.

“Uhm… Did I do something wrong?” She says.

I freeze, is she not afraid? Why was she talking as if she were talking to someone? Can she see me?

“I asked if I did something to upset you.”

And then her eyes move up and look right into mine. For the first time in centuries I feel as if I have ignited, that I am alive and that my heart once again beats like all other human beings.

“You… Can you see me?” I ask hesitantly, afraid that if I may speak too loudly she’ll scamper away like a mouse.

Her soft lips part slightly as she nods.

He told me his name was Dante Verona. He was the original owner of the Verona manor and he comes from an Italian royal family. But he was assassinated centuries ago in this very manor during a masquerade party. So I assume that his spirit is trapped here. He was wearing an intricate black, red, and white Venetian mask that hid his face. He wore matching black and red noble attire and his hair was a curly dark chocolate brown that went down to his neck.

Overall he was a total mystery. His entire existence was perplexing to me. Yes I do believe in the paranormal but never would I think I’d meet a real life ghost.

“I assume your grand father is Lorenzo? Has he passed on?” Dante asks, cutting through the thick silence.

I blink a few times, maybe if I blink hard enough he’ll disappear and that’ll confirm that this was all just my imagination. So I blink, but Dante’s translucent self is still hovering in front of me. The blank expression of his mask makes me slightly uneasy. I couldn’t get a read on the guy at all.

Coughing, I finally answer, “Uhm yeah… He was my grand father. He left me this manor in his will. And he didn’t mention any ghosts or anything like that.” I add.

“Lorenzo couldn’t see me. You’re the first to see me actually.” Dante says. His voice sounded smooth but the mask muffled it slightly. But he also sounded like he was in pain. I wonder how long he’s been here, trapped in this manor.

“So this whole time you were all alone?”

“Yes.” He softly replies. “Just me. Only my spirit is here.”

“That must be hard.” I say, but not in a pitying sounding way. The last thing he wants is pity probably.

Dante hovers away and I follow him into the living room. Looking up I see him hover up to the chandelier. He looks down at me, I can see his dark green irises through the black holes of the mask.

“Every day is hard. God has cursed me, rejected my entry into the heavens.” His voice cracks. "My death occurred in the very room we are in."

I look around the oriental room we are in. It has been modernized over the years, but I can imagine how it looked in his century. The masked party people, music, drinks, lies and deception. All of it in the room we are in but centuries before.

"My killer has not been found but I know they are long dead. Knowing that they burn in hell brings me peace. And I have learned to accept that I am to remain here.”

Then he rambles on about his life story. The tragedies he lived through, the friends he made and lost, wars and battles faced, and lovers went and gone. But I don't mind that this conversation is one sided. He has had no one to talk to for centuries so he deserves a listener.

"I apologize my lady. I have droned on for far too long. It's impolite..." Dante says in a dejected tone. But I reassure him.

"Y-You're okay! I understand. You haven't had someone to talk to in a long time I imagine. Besides, I found your life story very interesting."

Dante hovers down to where I'm sat on the couch. He also sits beside me. Leaning in close he tilts his masked face to the side as he comes closer to mine. I move away slightly; his body emits an eerie chill.

"Tell me about you. What is your name?" He asks, his eyes twinkle with an emotion unknown to me.

"I'm Y/n L/n. I originally lived in the United States, but I moved here as you know." I mutter. I've never been one to talk a lot anyways.

Dante looks me up and down. His fingers reach out causing me to flinch back, but he goes to touch the fabric of my black dress rather than my skin. To my surprise his fingers can touch the fabric, they don’t phase through it.

"Why do you wear black? Are you a widow? Has your husband passed on?" He asks softly.

I feel myself giggle slightly and he looks up at me with probably a confused expression.

"I've never been married silly, I'm only 23 years old.”

Dante’s emerald eyes widen. “23 and unmarried? Has the societal norm changed? Because my sister was married off to her husband when she was 16.”

I cringe physically. “Oooh yeah, lots of things have changed. But also I’m wearing black because it’s just my style. It’s called goth, it’s a music based style. I can tell you about it sometime.”

Dante looks at me like I’ve grown three heads. I can see it in his eyes.

“Ahem- Anyways. Why do you wear that mask?” I ask.

Dante breaks the eye contact and looks down at the side. “It does not come off. No matter how hard I try to remove it, it only stays. I cannot remove the clothing either.”

I nod. “Is it because it was the last thing you wore before you died?”

He nods in return.

“I assume so.”

He moves closer to me ever so slightly. His gloved hands caress my h/c locks of hair and then he brushes his fingers across my cheeks and jawline.

“What are you doing?” I ask breathlessly.

Dante’s hooded eyes shine with an emotion I cannot read. But I feel like my life from this day forward will never be the same. Can the living and the dead co exist?

Dante Verona. Will we be able to share the same roof?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A profoundly stupid case about video game cheating could transform adblocking into a copyright infringement

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's a weird consequence of our societal shift from capitalism (where riches come from profits) to feudalism (where riches come from rents): increasingly, your rights to your actual property (the physical stuff you own) are trumped by corporations' metaphorical "intellectual property" claims.

That's a lot to unpack! Let's start with a quick primer on profits and rents. Capitalists invest money in buying equipment, then they pay workers wages to use that equipment to produce goods and services. Profit is the sum a capitalist takes home from this arrangement: money made from paying workers to do productive things.

Now, rents: "rent" is the money a rentier makes by owning a "factor of production": something the capitalist needs in order to make profits. Capitalists risk their capital to get profits, but rents are heavily insulated from risk.

For example: a coffee shop owner buys espresso machines, hires baristas, and rents a storefront. If they do well, the landlord can raise their rent, denying them profits and increasing rents. But! If a great new cafe opens across the street and the coffee shop owner goes broke, the landlord is in great shape, because they now have a vacant storefront they can rent, and they can charge extra for a prime location across the street from the hottest new coffee shop in town.

The "moral philosophers" that today's self-described capitalists claim to worship – Adam Smith, David Ricardo – hated rents. For them, profits were the moral way to get rich, because when capitalists chase profits, they necessarily chase the production of things that people want.

When rentiers chase rents, they do so at the expense of profits. Every dollar a capitalist pays in rent – licenses for IP, rent for a building, etc – is a dollar that can't be extracted in profit, and then reinvested in the production of more goods and services that society desires.

The "free markets" of Adam Smith weren't free from regulation, they were free from rents.

The moral philosophers' hatred of rents was really a hatred of feudalism. The industrial revolution wasn't merely (or even primarily) the triumph of new machines: rather, it was the triumph of profits over rent. For the industrial revolution to succeed, the feudal arrangement had to end. Capitalism is incompatible with hereditary lords receiving guaranteed rents from hereditary serfs who are legally obliged to work for them. Capitalism triumphed over feudalism when the serfs were turned off of the land (becoming the "free labor" who went to work in the textile mills) and the land itself was given over to sheep grazing (providing the wool for those same mills).

But that doesn't mean that the industrial revolution invented profits. Profits were to be found in feudal societies, wherever a wealthy person increased their wealth by investing in machines and hiring workers to use them. The thing that made feudalism feudal was how conflicts between rents and profits cashed out. For so long as the legal system elevated the claims of rentiers over the claims of capitalists, the society was feudal. Once the legal system gave priority to profit over rent, it became capitalist.

Capitalists hate capitalism. The engine of capitalism is insecurity. The successful capitalist is like the fastest gun in the old west: there's always a young gun out there looking to "disrupt" their fortune with a new invention, product, or organizational strategy that "creatively destroys" the successful businesses of the day and replaces them with new ones:

https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-capitalism/

That's a hard way to live, with your every success serving as a blinking KICK ME sign visible to every ambitious person in the world. Precarity makes people miserable and nuts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

So capitalists universally aspire to become rentiers and investors seek out companies that have a plan to extract rent. This is why Warren Buffett is so priapatic for companies with "moats and walls" – legal privileges and market structures that protect the business from competition and disruption:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-explains-moat-principle-164442359.html

Feudal rents were mostly derived from land, but even in the feudal era, the king was known to reward loyal lickspittles with rents over ideas. The "patents royal" were the legally protected right to decide who could make or do certain things: for example, you might have a patent royal over the production of silver ribbon, and anyone who wanted to make a silver ribbon would have to pay for your permission. If you chose to grant that permission exclusively to one manufacturer, then no one else could make it, and you could charge a license fee to the manufacturer that accounted for nearly all their profit.

Today, rentiers are also interested in land. Bill Gates is the country's number one landowner, and in many towns, private equity landlords are snappinig up every single family home that hits the market and converting it to a badly maintained slum:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston

But the 21st Century's defining source of rent is "IP" – a controversial term that I use here to mean, "Any law or policy that allows a company to exert legal control over its competitors, critics and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is in irreconcilable conflict with real property rights. Think of HP selling you a printer and wanting to decide which ink you use, or John Deere selling you a tractor and wanting to tell you who can fix it. Or, for that matter, Apple selling you a phone and dictating which software you are allowed to install on it.

Think of Unity, a company that makes tools for video-game makers, demanding a royalty from every game that is eventually sold, calling this "shared success":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Every time one of these conflicts ends with IP's triumph over real property rights, that is a notch in favor of calling the world we live in now "technofeudalist" rather than "technocapitalist":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Once you start to think of "IP" as "laws that let me control how other people use their real property," a lot of the seemingly incoherent fights over IP snap into place. This also goes a long way to explaining how otherwise sensible people can agree on expansions of IP to achieve some short-term goal, irrespective of the spillover harms from such a move. Hard cases make bad law, and hard IP cases make terrible law.

Five years ago, some anti-fascist counterdemonstrators hit on the clever idea of blaring top 40 music during neo-Nazi marches, on the theory that this would prevent Nazis from uploading videos of their marches to Youtube and other platforms, whose filters would block any footage that included copyrighted music:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

Thankfully, this didn't work, but not for lack of trying. And it might still work, if calls for beefing up video copyright filters are heeded. Cops all over the place are already blaring Taylor Swift songs and Disney tunes to prevent their interactions with the public from being uploaded:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

The same thinking that causes progressives to recklessly argue in favor of upload filters also causes them to demand that web scraping be treated as a copyright crime. They think they're creating a world where AI companies can't rip off their creation to train a model; they're actually creating a world where the Internet Archive can't capture JD Vance's embarrassing old podcast appearances or newspaper editorial boards' advocacy for positions they now recant:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

It's not that Nazi marches are good, or that scraping can't be bad – it's just that advocating for the use of IP to address either is a cure that's not just worse than the disease – it's also not a cure.

A problem can be real, and still not be solvable with IP. I have enormous sympathy for gamers who rail against cheaters who use aftermarket hacks to improve their aim, see through buildings, or command other unfair advantages.

If you want to tell a stranger how they must configure their PC or console, IP ("any law that lets you control your competitors, critics or customers") is an obvious answer. But – as with other attempts to solve real problems with IP – this is a cure that is both worse than the disease, and also not a cure after all.

Back in 2002, Blizzard sued some hobbyists over a program called "bnetd." Bnetd was a program that provided a game-server you could connect to with the Blizzard games that you'd bought. It was created as an alternative to Battlenet, Blizzard's notoriously unreliable game-server software that left gamers frustrated and furious due to frequent outages:

https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

To the public, Blizzard made several arguments against bnetd. They claimed that it encouraged piracy, because – unlike the official Battlenet servers – it didn't check whether the copies of Blizzard software that connected to it had a valid license key. Gamers didn't really care about that, but they did respond to another argument: that bnetd lacked the anti-cheat checking of Battlenet.

But that wasn't what Blizzard took to the court: in court, they argued that the hobbyists who made bnetd violated copyright law. Specifically, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans "circumvention of access controls to copyrighted works." Basically, Blizzard argued that bnetd's authors violated the law because they used debuggers to examine the software they'd paid for, while it ran on their own computers, to figure out how to make a game server of their own.

Blizzard didn't sue bnetd's authors for pirating Blizzard software (they didn't – they'd paid for their copies). They didn't sue them for abetting other gamers' piracy. They certainly didn't sue them for making a cheat-friendly game-server.

Blizzard sued them for analyzing software they'd paid for, while it was running on their own computers.

Imagine if Walmart – one of the biggest book-retailers in America – had a policy that said that you could only shelve the books you bought at Walmart on shelves that you also bought at Walmart. Now imagine that Walmart successfully argued that measuring the books you bought from them and using those measurements to create your own compatible book-case violated their IP rights!

This is an outrageous triumph of IP rights over real property rights, and yet gamers vocally backed Blizzard in the early noughts, because gamers hate cheaters and because IP law is (correctly) understood as "the law that lets a company tell you how you can use your own real, physical property." Hard cases make bad law, hard IP cases make batshit law.

It's more than 20 years since bnetd, and cheating continues to serve as a Trojan horse to smuggle in batshit new IP laws. In Germany, Sony is suing the cheat-device maker Datel:

https://torrentfreak.com/sonys-ancient-lawsuit-vs-cheat-device-heads-in-right-direction-sonys-defeat-240705/

Sony argues that the Datel device – which rewrites the contents of a player's device's RAM, at the direction of that player – infringes copyright. Sony claims that the values that its programs write to your device's RAM chips are copyrighted works that it has created, and that altering that copyrighted work makes an unauthorized derivative work, which infringes its copyright.

Yes, this is batshit, and thankfully, Sony has been thwarted in court to date, but it is steaming ahead to the EU's highest court. If it succeeds, then it will open up every tool that modifies your computer at your direction to this kind of claim.

How bad can it be? Well, get this: the German publishing giant Axel Springer (owned by a monomaniacal Trumpist and Israel hardliner who has ordered journalists in his US news outlets to go easy on both) is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a "derivative work" of Axel Springer's web-pages:

https://torrentfreak.com/ad-blocking-infringes-copyright-ancient-sony-cheat-lawsuit-may-prove-pivotal-240729/

Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of.

Axel Springer's war on browsers is a particularly pernicious maneuver, because browsers are the best example we have of internet software that serves as a "user agent." "User agent" is an old-timey engineering synonym for "browser" that reflects the browser's role: to go out onto the web on your behalf and bring back things for you, which it displays in the way you prefer:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Want to block flickering GIFs to forestall photosensitive epileptic servers? Ask your user agent to find and delete them. Want to shift colors into a gamut that accounts for your color-blindness? Ask your user-agent:

https://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/15/dankam/

Want to goose the font size and contrast so you can read the sadistic grey-on-white type that young designers use in the mistaken belief that black-on-white type is "hard on the eyes"? That's what Reader Mode is for:

https://frankgroeneveld.nl/2021/08/24/most-underused-browser-feature/

The foundation of any good digital relationship is a device that works for you, not for the people who own the servers you connect to. Even if they don't plan on screwing you over by directing your user agent to attack you on their behalf right now, the very existence of a facility in your technology that causes it to betray you, by design, is a moral hazard that inevitably results in your victimization:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

"IP" ("a law that lets me control how you use your own property") is a tempting solution to every problem, but ultimately, IP ends up magnifying the power of the already powerful, in contests where your only hope of victory is having a user agent whose only loyalty is to you.

The monotonic, dangerous expansion of IP reflects the growing victory of rents over profits – income from owning things, rather than income from doing things. Everyday people may argue for IP in the belief that it will solve their immediate problems – with AI, or Nazis, or in-game cheats – but ultimately, the expansion of a law that limits how you can use your property (including your capital) to uses that don't threaten neofeudalists will doom you to technoserfdom.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/#hard-cases-make-bad-copyright-law

[dwellordream]

“The impact of both new technology and the growing influx of immigrant workers can best be seen in the New England textile mills. In the 1820s and 1830s, young women from the farm country of New England went to work in the massive brick textile factories springing up along the Merrimack River near Lowell, Massachusetts, and other New England towns. In 1820, Lowell--then called Chelmsford--was a sleepy village of about 200 farm families, located about 25 miles northwest of Boston. Six years later, it had grown into a town of 2,500 and was incorporated as the town of Lowell. In 1830, the population surged to 6,000, and tripled to 18,000 just six years later. By 1850, Lowell boasted a population of 33,000.

What created this booming growth was the rise of the textile industry. Other New England mill towns also grew, but Lowell quickly became the center of the New England textile industry and drew workers--mostly single women as young as 16 or 17--from across New England. These women generally came from the middle ranks of farm families, those that were neither impoverished nor wealthy. The desire to be financially and socially independent, to finance an education, or to simply experience the pleasures of living and working in a larger town drew many young farm women to the mills. Some women did contribute their earnings to their families, but mostly they worked in the mills to earn their own income.

…Mill owners insisted that their female hands be in their boarding houses by 10 o’clock each evening, and they urged boarding house keepers, usually older women, to report any violators to the management. In the early years, women were required to attend church services regularly, and some mill owners even deducted pew rent from the women’s earnings and paid it directly to local churches. These close living and working arrangements created a camaraderie among the women workers, a community of like-minded women who eagerly wanted to improve their minds and their lives. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, they organized and attended lectures, language classes, sewing groups, and literary ‘improvement circles’--after working a 12-hour day. From one of these circles was born the Lowell Offering, the first journal ever written by and for mill women. The journal published poetry, short stories, and commentary penned by the female workers.

Workers also organized themselves into labor-reform groups to crusade for better working conditions and shorter workdays. As technological innovations enabled women to work faster and produce more, mill owners assigned more machines to workers--without raising wages. For example, at Hamilton Company, one of the mills in Lowell, the average number of looms per weaver more than doubled between 1840 and 1854. The workload for spinners increased as well. Workers were expected to operate more machines at a faster rate. But wages remained the same--although the company reaped higher profits from the workers’ increased productivity.

…In 1846, Elias Howe introduced the first sewing machine. Five years later, in 1851, the addition of a foot treadle for easier operation made the machine an indispensable tool. But instead of easing the sewer’s burden, the sewing machine increased it. Hand sewers could no longer compete with the sewing machine. In one day, one sewing machine operator could do as much work as six hand sewers. Hand sewers were forced to buy or rent sewing machines, or work in garment factories, where they had no control over their wages or hours.

To make matters worse, seamstresses, like the mill workers of New England, were expected to work faster and produce more while working for the same wages. New technology, such as the sewing machine or improved looms, enabled consumers to buy manufactured goods at reasonable prices--but at the expense of factory workers, who were not paid a fair wage for operating this new technology.

…Despite the long hours and low wages, women still preferred working in factories to being domestic servants. At least factory workers had some free time; servants were on call 24 hours a day. Domestics worked up to 16 hours a day, with one afternoon off each week. They earned $1 to $1.25 a week plus board. Servants’ duties varied according to their employers’ requirements and the number of other servants employed in the house. But in general, the work was very demanding. Domestics devoted entire days to washing, baking, ironing and cleaning each room. They were accustomed to heavy physical work--cleaning out fireplaces or emptying chamber pots--and trudging up and down staircases several times a day.

Besides enduring the back-breaking work, servants also had to endure the snobbery of their social ‘superiors.’ During the colonial era, servants were treated as part of the family and joined in all household activities. By the mid-19th century, however, they were regarded as mere hired hands, and were viewed as an inferior class. The Boston census of 1845 categorized servants as part of the ‘unclassified residue of the population.’ No wonder that young women wanted to avoid the social stigma of being a domestic.”

- Harriet Sigerman, “‘I Never Worked So Hard’: Weavers, Stitchers, and Domestics.’” in An Unfinished Battle: American Women, 1848-1865

[bunny--manders]

Not that sure it's that weird, but Oleg in a cooking show?

Probably an AU since I don't think legally dead accomplices to terrorism go on cooking shows all that often! From Sergey's point of view.

-

The timer was ticking on the final task of the day. Everything had been planned down to the smallest detail. The cameras on set were rolling. The discreet, cleverly hidden cameras Sergey had placed around the set were recording too, but he was the only one who knew they were there. He hadn't even told Oleg what he had in store for the day.

Of course he believed Oleg could win the competition on his own. But Sergey had his own theory of game design. The best way to win was to make your own rules and control the state of play from the start.

People just loved to connect their devices to the internet these days. Smart fridges, smart microwaves, even smart convection ovens. A month before filming even started, Sergey had found out the brand of all those clever modern devices the showrunners had set up in exchange for generous product placement deals. Hacking into the systems had been trivially easy. Nobody expected to have to worry about malicious code in their microwave.

He'd started subtly in the earlier rounds, filmed two days ago. One contestant had failed to cook a chicken breast all the way through, and never even noticed that the burner the pan was resting on was turning off and on at random. Another had opened their fridge to find wilted greens that had spent the past night in a machine that cycled between freezing and far too warm. One by one, Sergey had picked off the competitors with overcooked steak and frozen sticks of butter and burnt fish.

Oleg had been magnificent, as he always was, working steadily through his own dishes as the others flailed around setting pans on fire or trying to thaw frozen fish. He accepted compliments from the judges with his trademark stoicism. Now he was working on the fiddly details of a gâteau St. Honore, frowning in concentration over his work. Sergey took a moment to admire his face in profile before turning the temperate on someone else's oven up to 260 degrees Celcius. Let her try to win with a charcoal brick instead of a Prinsesstårta.

The timer ticked down. Sergey sabotaged a mixer, ruining someone's buttercream, and cranked up the heat on another baker's ganache. Perhaps he'd overdone it this time; Oleg was the only one who ended the competition with a completed cake at all.  While the woman who'd charred her Prinsesstårta sobbed into her apron, Sergey sat back in his chair and dug a spoon into a pint of ice cream he'd bought the moment Oleg had left town for the competition. 

On his way back to clean up his workstation, Oleg paused and glanced directly at the camera Sergey had aimed at it. For a second, Oleg seemed to be looking straight at him.

"I could have won on my own, you know," he said, so softly only the microphone Sergey had taped under the butcher's block countertop could pick it up.

"I know," Sergey told the screen, "but it's more fun this way."