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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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When Facebook came for your battery, feudal security failed

When George Hayward was working as a Facebook data-scientist, his bosses ordered him to run a “negative test,” updating Facebook Messenger to deliberately drain users’ batteries, in order to determine how power-hungry various parts of the apps were. Hayward refused, and Facebook fired him, and he sued:

https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refused-to-do-negative-testing-awsuit/

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/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

Hayward balked because he knew that among the 1.3 billion people who use Messenger, some would be placed in harm’s way if Facebook deliberately drained their batteries — physically stranded, unable to communicate with loved ones experiencing emergencies, or locked out of their identification, payment method, and all the other functions filled by mobile phones.

As Hayward told Kathianne Boniello at the New York Post, “Any data scientist worth his or her salt will know, ‘Don’t hurt people…’ I refused to do this test. It turns out if you tell your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t go over very well.”

Negative testing is standard practice at Facebook, and Hayward was given a document called “How to run thoughtful negative tests” regarding which he said, “I have never seen a more horrible document in my career.”

We don’t know much else, because Hayward’s employment contract included a non-negotiable binding arbitration waiver, which means that he surrendered his right to seek legal redress from his former employer. Instead, his claim will be heard by an arbitrator — that is, a fake corporate judge who is paid by Facebook to decide if Facebook was wrong. Even if he finds in Hayward’s favor — something that arbitrators do far less frequently than real judges do — the judgment, and all the information that led up to it, will be confidential, meaning we won’t get to find out more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

One significant element of this story is that the malicious code was inserted into Facebook’s app. Apps, we’re told, are more secure than real software. Under the “curated computing” model, you forfeit your right to decide what programs run on your devices, and the manufacturer keeps you safe. But in practice, apps are just software, only worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/23/peek-a-boo/#attack-helicopter-parenting

Apps are part what Bruce Schneier calls “feudal security.” In this model, we defend ourselves against the bandits who roam the internet by moving into a warlord’s fortress. So long as we do what the warlord tells us to do, his hired mercenaries will keep us safe from the bandits:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

But in practice, the mercenaries aren’t all that good at their jobs. They let all kinds of badware into the fortress, like the “pig butchering” apps that snuck into the two major mobile app stores:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/pig-butchering-scam-apps-sneak-into-apples-app-store-and-google-play/

It’s not merely that the app stores’ masters make mistakes — it’s that when they screw up, we have no recourse. You can’t switch to an app store that pays closer attention, or that lets you install low-level software that monitors and overrides the apps you download.

Indeed, Apple’s Developer Agreement bans apps that violate other services’ terms of service, and they’ve blocked apps like OG App that block Facebook’s surveillance and other enshittification measures, siding with Facebook against Apple device owners who assert the right to control how they interact with the company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

When a company insists that you must be rendered helpless as a condition of protecting you, it sets itself up for ghastly failures. Apple’s decision to prevent every one of its Chinese users from overriding its decisions led inevitably and foreseeably to the Chinese government ordering Apple to spy on those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

Apple isn’t shy about thwarting Facebook’s business plans, but Apple uses that power selectively — they blocked Facebook from spying on Iphone users (yay!) and Apple covertly spied on its customers in exactly the same way as Facebook, for exactly the same purpose, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The ultimately, irresolvable problem of Feudal Security is that the warlord’s mercenaries will protect you against anyone — except the warlord who pays them. When Apple or Google or Facebook decides to attack its users, the company’s security experts will bend their efforts to preventing those users from defending themselves, turning the fortress into a prison:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Feudal security leaves us at the mercy of giant corporations — fallible and just as vulnerable to temptation as any of us. Both binding arbitration and feudal security assume that the benevolent dictator will always be benevolent, and never make a mistake. Time and again, these assumptions are proven to be nonsense.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_%2841118890174%29.jpg

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

[Image ID: A painting depicting the Roman sacking of Jerusalem. The Roman leader's head has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's head. The wall has Apple's 'Think Different' wordmark and an Ios 'low battery' icon.]

Next week (Feb 8-17), I'll be in Australia, touring my book *Chokepoint Capitalism* with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We'll be in Brisbane on Feb 8, and then we're doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 9. Next is Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. I hope to see you!

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

#pluralistic #manorial security #feudal security #apple #mobile #apps #security through obscurity #binding arbitration #arbitration waivers #transparency #danegeld #surveillance lag

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olderthannetfic · 29 days ago

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https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/766611758459879424/youtube-just-showed-me-the-most-dumb-video-essay?source=share

Youtube fed you that swill and you actually watched it? And then you read the comments?? That's why the algorithm is like this. Feeding people hateful garbage makes them stick around.

Log out (If you very much like features that are only available logged in, just make a second google account to use for youtube and nothing else)

Download Firefox https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/windows/

Go into the privacy settings and set Enhanced Tracking Protection to "strict"

Install an adblocker, I like ublock origin https://ublockorigin.com/

Optionally, install some more anti-track addons, like Privacy Badger or Duckduckgo's privacy essentials

Install the container addon and set one up to qurantine youtube away from everything else https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Now what you have is a box that has youtube in it and literally nothing else. No ads, no personal information, no creepy stalkerware, no ability for other websites to see in the box, or for youtube to see out of it.

And now the fun part. Use the adblocker to nuke the entire sidebar and endcard overlays. Just select these with the eyedropper from the adblock extension, preview it to make sure you're not blocking more than you mean to, and bam, it's like three clicks and and you'll never see it again, it's beautiful.

Do this and you can watch all the videos you please and will NEVER have the algorithm shove some misogynistic garbage in your face because it crunched some math and knows that users with your profile are stasticsally likely to spend time on the side when served that sort of trash.

You can also use the adblocker to get rid of the entire comments section, or to nuke any design element or feature that you find annoying or ugly. It's called an adblocker, but it blocks anything based on URLs and HTML strings. The posibilites are endless, freeing, and beautiful. I use adblockers for aesthetics and accesibility at least as much as for actual ads.

I do this with every website I use regularily, including tumblr (though only the worst few [including youtube] have dedicated quarantine containers). It's a few steps to set up, but once you have the extensions installed and know how to use them, nuking algorithmic feeds and making sure that you only see what you actually want to see takes like ten seconds.

And no, before you say you have to use the app, this does work on mobile. Download Firefox for mobile, install the adblocker, install the anti-trackers, and use youtube in the browser instead of the app because taking an extra three seconds to load and having a slightly less optimized layout is worth not being unundated with advertisements and hate.

You can also root your phone and install adblockers that work with apps, but that's a more involved process and takes more effort and knowledge than simply installing a new browser and using an eyedropper tool to select a sidebar.

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sheabutterbitch · 2 years ago

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Do you have any tips on how to be more present? Im trying to stay off my phone so I can focus on my art and so many other things that need my attention but im struggling. Sending you love🫶🏼

Delete social media apps and only use them on your mobile web browser. Not having apps like twitter and insgagram on my phone reduces mindless scrolling because every use is intentional. An alternative, I haven’t used it, but there is an app called “one sec” that forces you to take a breath and wait a moment before opening a social app. Both of these methods are called “friction” between app use.

Keep a habit tracker in your journal or download a digital one and incentivize yourself when meeting goals for the week. For example, if you meet all of your daily habit goals for the week you can purchase something small you’ve been wanting or get a sweet treat.

Go to sleep with your phone on your dresser or somewhere across your room. This will stop you from checking your phone first thing in the morning. Commit to not using your phone for the first hour of your day and the last hour of your night.

Utilize your Do Not Disturb and Focus features! Less notifications means less reasons to pick up your phone.

Pick one day out of the week to be your project day. Even if you only designate half of the day; it should be your day to intentionally turn your phone off and work. I did this when I was studying for my board exams. Inform your friends and family of this so they can hold you accountable — you’ll have no one to send tiktoks to or socialize with online then!

A personal goal I have set for myself this year is to make things easier for my future self. If I have a thought to do something, I will do my absolute best to do it right then as opposed to some unidentified time later on. My future self is always grateful.

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saezurumurmurs · 8 months ago

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A BL Platform For Everyone

NB: Please reblog this for visibility!

A little over two years ago, me and my BL crew were in our little chat sharing recommendations.

Cat had an impressive spread sheet, Marcie and I had iCloud Notes, and it was pretty much chaos.

I looked at it and said out loud, "There has to be a better way for us to keep track of our reads and share recommendations. There has to be right?"

Cat said she wished someone would build a BL app with everything already there. Me, a developer of almost thirty years, paused while a floodlight (not a light bulb) went off in my head.

“Well I could maybe build one… cause like, I build stuff. How would that be?”

By the end of the conversation Cat had invited me to build an app for BL.

Four weeks later, in late February of 2022, digitaljuicy.com was online.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been listening to the fandom, paying attention to feedback, poured over analytics, read your responses to the Reader’s Survey and continued to craft a platform with all this in mind.

What I have been building is 100% for us... there is nothing but BL and it is an attempt to encompass ALL of BL. Not just the bits and pieces.

But for two years I've been struggling. Struggling in many ways, but specifically to get what I wanted out of the platform. I tried and failed so many times.

In September of 2022 I tried to raise venture capital to build the platform I wanted for us. I pitched it to accelerators and true blue venture capital.

Juicy is what is called 'pre-seed'. Which means were still so new and evolving, under-resourced and while there was interest, there was no joy. No funding was raised.

In December 2023, I realised it was time to rethink Juicy. i have been on the deepest dive for months rebuilding Juicy from the ground up and preparing the framework for the mobile app.

I’ve built something I want to use… and wild, I’m building it and using it as a fan at the same time. I'm at the point where it's impossible not to want to share.

And what kind of platform do I mean? At its most basic level:

You can track your reads, watches and plays

You can review and recommend the titles to the community, your friends, strangers on Twitter, your friend you're trying to corrupt outside the fandom. Your poison.

Timelines for you, for titles, for episodes, chapters… just about everything. I mean everything: The creators, the publishers, the studios, the actors... you can leave reviews and status posts on EVERYTHING. No algorithms, no force feeding... just discovery, recommendations and honest reviews by this community about our community and the industry we feed.

Collections! Lists of stuff you're reading, dropped, want to read, want to buy, love or hate, all pretty and organised and shareable..

A growing database resource of titles, tagged up to its eyeballs with a minutiae of data.. with reading an streaming links and anything else we find that we think is relevant.

But it is also a lot more than this.

I wanted it to be more than what it was. I want to turn Juicy into a mobile app, add some more functionality and more specifically, platform all of BL for its non-Asian fandom.

We get left out of so much, I feel like we need our own thing.

I don’t know about ya’ll, but I was tired of being banned on social media for sharing content. How you gonna ban me for saying a 2D fictional character needs to be shot with shite and strung with cobweb? But they did… and I know it’s not just me.

What about the creators? How do they interface with the non-Japanese or non-Korean fandoms? On which misogynistic hell site?

What about the publishers and merchandisers? What about the little Etsy sellers? Why does BL have to hidden away in the databases of mangaupdates, anisearch and anilist? Why does every single manga tracker out there seem to have pitiful listings for BL?

Is it because we’re a female or queer audience?

Look at this lil video I made:

youtube

Either way, I’ve long felt it’s time for us to do our own thing. So I’ve been building it. Pixel by pixel. Feature by feature on my own.

Juicy has been a small chat group, but I’m the only developer. We’ve always been clear about what we wanted to build: A platform for the fandom, the creators, the publishers, the merchandisers… my goal is a one-stop platform for BL and I am damn close to presenting this new iteration.

This was and remains the core of what I’m building: The largest English platform for BL on the planet. The functionality is one thing, but building a database like that is not a one-person job.

So now I need your help.

First to keep the servers online, so I can continue to build and develop and finally, finally release the mobile app. I can't tell you how much I want that.

I’m close to pushing the new Juicy 3.0 out, and I’m very in love with the work I’ve done since December. It’s a new look, and it works 1000 times better than the previous iterations of Juicy.

I just have hit a wall financially, and need your help and support to get it over the line.

Juicy's ass is fat and I been carrying her mostly alone for two solid years.

I’m going to launch a Kickstarter for this project in a bit so I can hire another developer to help with the trickier bits and fine tune the mobile app, but for now, I felt a Patreon would at least help us keep the servers up and maybe, just maybe allow us to afford a few crucial bits that will elevate your experience as a user.

And because I’m a developer, and I can do some pretty kinky shit with APIs and such, if you support this Patreon campaign, you will get some nice feature perks on the platform automagically. You won’t have to pay again to access these perks in-app later.

As many perks as I can cook up anyway, not the least of which will be access to some of the nicer functions and features I’ve already built into the platform.

When the mobile app launches, you will get it first and for free! Plus we’ve been talking about a lot of other ways we can make the platform fun beyond what I've done already.

I plan to monetise the platform in various ways, but in a profit sharing model. You contribute to the database, you contribute content, you get a share of whatever the platform makes. This is already built into the system. This will be open to anyone willing, but to Patrons first.

Finally, I'm limiting the number of people who can subscribe via Patreon to 1000 people. Once we hit that number, the rolls will be closed to new membership, and everyone directed to the platform to pay for any services or merchandise.

My goal for this group of Patrons is that you become an exclusive and tightly knit inner circle.

My hope is that you will help me actively shape what Juicy will become. Your votes and say will carry weight. Your feature requests considered and if possible implemented first.

You will get access to exclusive merchandise, exclusive giveaways and promos (like free stuff), and exclusive programming from the team.

With your help we will produce an exclusive podcast for Patrons only discussing all things BL and Juicy (honestly our conversations are generally wild and hilarious... it will be a rollick for sure), along with other content for Patrons only. We've even planned watch parties and other fun shit... I swear, we want you all to be our greatest ambassadors so we are planning as many treats as we can.

Your access on the platform will be specific to your Patreon subscription and your treatment will be VIP for the life of your subscription.

Finally, the way my auADHD are set up, I have no interest in the dramas of the BL fandom, so this is never going to be about gatekeeping access to anything. It’s about making more access possible. You can help bring us all together and make us stronger as a group.

So do you think Digital Juicy sounds like something you’d like in on?

Okute Sea

Saezuru Murmurs

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australianwomensnews · 6 months ago

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Inmates convicted of domestic violence tracking their former partners from inside prison. A suspected child trafficker purchasing 11 magnetic surveillance devices. An elderly couple whose relationship deterioration started in tracking and ended in murder-suicide.

These are all examples of what the NSW Crime Commission says is an escalating problem – criminals using trackers to keep tabs on their victims.

Surveillance devices, including GPS trackers that can attach to a car, mobile phone spyware and bluetooth tracking devices like Air Tags, are increasingly being used in both domestic violence and organised crime, says a report from the Crime Commission released on Tuesday.

“It’s scary. We knew devices were being used in crime, particularly organised crime, but didn’t know how widely,” NSW Crime Commissioner Michael Barnes told the Herald.

The Commission was initially investigating the use of surveillance in organised crime, like in the execution of drug kingpin Alen Moradian, but came to realise they “had to include domestic violence”, said Barnes.

Asked about the crossover between organised crime and domestic violence, he said: “I think it’s the type of people. They are macho and violent, very possessive, their ego is out of control, it’s not surprising they are unrealistically possessive and controlling.

“To do that sort of work you have to be involved in violence, and have a command and control approach.”

The Commission analysed 5663 purchases of tracking devices, with alarming findings. One in four purchasers had a history of domestic violence, 15 per cent of purchasers had a history in serious or organised crime, and 126 were subject to apprehended violence orders at the time of purchase.

One in three offenders charged under the Surveillance Devices Act with unlawfully using tracking devices were also associated with organised crime networks, the report said.

Such was the commission’s alarm that it referred 391 of those purchasers to NSW Police for investigation. NSW Police were contacted for comment.

One man – with no criminal convictions but suspected to be involved in the trafficking and sexual abuse of children – purchased 11 magnetic trackers in the past year.

In another instance, an elderly man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, used a GPS tracker from a car shop to stalk his wife of 25 years before murdering her. “The tracking appeared to form part of a series of behaviours that the offender used to prevent the victim from leaving the relationship,” said the report.

In another example, two men, both in prison for domestic violence offences, continue to undertake surveillance on their partners from inside.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Barnes.

Barnes said the Find My iPhone app can alert people who suspect they are being surveilled.

“It gives you an alert if you are in close vicinity and moving with an AirTag that isn’t on your device.”

The Crime Commission has made a number of recommendations to government to reduce access to tracking devices. These include amending legislation to explicitly prohibit accessing tracking devices in AVO proceedings and regulating the sale of surveillance devices through licensing, recording device identifiers and customer particulars, and mandatory reporting of suspicious transactions.

A spokesperson for Police Minister Yasmin Catley said the government “will consider the findings and respond in due course”.

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault, domestic or family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.

#auspol #feminism #radblr #domestic violence #stalking #abuse #tech based misogyny

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justinspoliticalcorner · 7 months ago

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Tom Perkins at The Guardian:

The Anti-Defamation League has spent record amounts on lobbying in recent years, including on bills opponents say are meant to punish criticism of Israel and target Jewish peace and Palestinian rights groups. The Jewish civil rights organization, founded in 1913, is the self-described “leading anti-hate organization in the world”, and has historically focused on combating antisemitism by shaping public opinion. Its lobbying spike marks a dramatic shift – it spent about $100,000 on lobbying in 2020 and is on pace to spend nearly $1.6m this year based on its first quarter expenditures, a Guardian analysis of federal records finds.

The spending positions the ADL as the largest pro-Israel lobbying force on domestic issues. Records show the surge’s broader aim is to promoting a controversial definition of antisemitism across a range of federal agencies and mobilizing the government to enforce it. The 16-fold spending increase is “breathtaking” and currently unmatched on Capitol Hill, said Craig Holman, who monitors lobbying issues with Public Citizen, a government watchdog non-profit that does not take positions on the Israel-Palestine debate. It comes amid a “fundamental shift in public opinion about Israel”, Holman said, pointing to nationwide anti-war demonstrations on college campuses. In a statement, the ADL denied that its lobbying targeted its opponents. It developed its “vast legislative agenda” in response to synagogue shootings and other violent incidents, and the organization “made a strategic decision to invest in its policy apparatus which has culminated in more robust government relations capabilities”, a spokesperson said.

The House in late April approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which the ADL lobbied for and would codify a definition of antisemitism that would limit some speech around Israel. It would be used in federal civil rights investigations in schools and, critics say, could ultimately limit protests and criticism of Israel on campus. The bill has yet to come before the Senate for a vote. Records also show lobbying on the so-called “TikTok ban”, which Joe Biden recently signed into law. The bill’s authors developed it over fear that the Chinese government was using the app to collect US data, but pro-Israel US lawmakers argued that TikTok should be banned in part because it promotes pro-Palestinian content over pro-Israel viewpoints. In a statement, the ADL said it only had conversations with lawmakers and did not support a ban. Public media pushes have coincided with the behind-the-scenes lobbying. The ADL also lobbied for a bill supporters say is aimed at pro-Palestinian protesters. It would grant the Internal Revenue Service power to eliminate the non-profit status of groups determined to support terrorism.

In late April, during a CNN appearance, the ADL president, Jonathan Greenblatt, likened the student groups to Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist organization. In its online antisemitism tracker regularly cited by mainstream media, the ADL often attributes “support for terror” to anti-war and ceasefire rallies by Jewish groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. “Iran has their military proxies like Hezbollah, and Iran has their campus proxies like these groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace,” Greenblatt said on CNN.

[...]

Expanding the definition of antisemitism

At the center of the firestorm over campus protests is a debate about whether some criticism of Israel and the protests are protected political speech. Under ADL-backed legislation, much of it would be defined as antisemitism, lobbying records show. The Antisemitic Awareness Act would require the federal government to “consider” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which includes some criticism of Israel and Zionism, as it investigates civil rights violations. The IHRA definition includes examples of antisemitism that are considered by free speech advocates to be protected by the first amendment, such as labeling Israel a racist state, questioning its right to exist and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”. If enacted, universities that allow such speech on their campuses could face funding cuts from the US Department of Education. The mere threat is pressuring schools to crack down on protesters, Fox said.

Other records also show that the ADL lobbied for a $48m increase in funding for investigations under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which currently employs the IHRA definition under a 2019 executive order. “If [the government] cannot appropriately investigate these cases, it cannot protect the rights, safety and wellbeing of students,” the ADL wrote. “We must ensure [it] has the resources it needs to be effective, fast, and robust in their investigations and response.” The new budget, which goes into effect in October, includes a $22m increase for Title VI investigations. The Antisemitism Awareness Act is opposed by groups and politicians across the political spectrum. The ACLU called the legislation “overbroad”, writing: “Criticism of Israel and its policies is political speech squarely protected by the First Amendment.” In a statement, the ADL disagreed, arguing the bill “does not stifle speech about Israel”.

The pro-Israel Apartheid apologist organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has spend record amounts of money to lobby for redefining the definition of antisemitism to mean basically any speech critical of Israel.

#Anti Defamation League #Antisemitism #Israel #Jonathan Greenblatt #Antisemitism Awareness Act #Campus Protests #TikTok Ban

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frozenemus · 11 months ago

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Small Palestine Support Information Thread

I like collecting and organizing information, it's like enrichment to my autistic pea-brain. As a result, I have decided to collect and organize information in a way that can potentially help contribute to aiding Palestine and shitting on Israel. If there is an entry on this list that is deemed untrustworthy, or you would like to contribute a source to the list, feel free to let me know! General Educational Resources About Palestine

Decolonize Palestine https://decolonizepalestine.com

Palestine 101 https://www.thepalestineacademy.com/palestine-101 Bread Recipe by a Palestinian Cook

(I'm sorry but it looked really tasty) https://mxriyum.com/kaak-al-quds-jerusalem-bread

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Information Correlating To The Genocide Itself

October 7 Fact Check https://www.oct7factcheck.com/index Zionism Observer (A database containing direct quotes and sources with timestamps of genocidal intent in Israel) https://zionism.observer

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Palestine Donation Resources Palestine Children's Relief Fund https://www.pcrf.net Link to tweet detailing how to donate e-sims through Simly (If you don't have twitter [keep it that way], the second link is to a tumblr post with the same information) 1. https://x.com/sofidilla/status/1721335795330822473?s=20 2. https://www.tumblr.com/spectra-bear/740308813101645824/heres-how-to-donate-e-sims-to-someone-in-gaza?source=share

Pious Projects' Emergency Winter Relief Aid for Gaza https://piousprojects.org/campaign/677

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Boycott and Activism Resources NoThanksBoycott App Linktree (NoThanks is a mobile application that allows you to determine if a product you're buying is from a pro-Israel company or not) https://linktr.ee/Nothanksboycott?utm_source=linktree_profile_share&ltsid=2c19b845-076e-44e6-a446-b11423edc49b BDS List of Companies Supporting Israel https://bdsmovement.net/Act-Now-Against-These-Companies-Profiting-From-Genocide

5 Calls (US only) (Provides contacts for US congressional representatives based on your location if you're in the US. There's also a script for how to structure the call) https://5calls.org/issue/israel-palestine-gaza-war-hamas-ceasefire

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Other Resources Ceasefire Tracker (Keeps track of individuals that have called for a ceasefire) Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ceasefire_Track Website: https://www.ceasefiretrack.com Accountability Archive (The reason I didn't include this in the info resources is because the database is not directly accessible. You can still submit evidence of public figures promoting the genocide in the form of website URLs however) https://accountabilityarchive.org

Hasbara Tracker (Another database that isn't currently accessible. They are looking for volunteers to help with receipt collection and organization though!) https://hasbaratracker.com US Congressional Representative Ceasefire Call Tracker (US only) (a list of represenatives and senators that have called for a ceasefire) https://workingfamilies.org/ceasefire-tracker

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Hopefully this helps someone contribute to the cause. The fact that we have to deal with a slaughter like this in 2024 is utterly abhorrent, especially when you have many of the world's leading powers are turning a blind eye to/actively supporting the perpetrators.

I also understand that contributing to something to any cause can seem incredibly daunting. You have people on social media saying to do so many things that it can feel overwhelming at times. The good news is that even the simplest of actions can help contribute to positive change. This can mean doing stuff like reposting/promoting information about the events at hand on social media, signing petitions, or calling your local representative (if you have one).

#palestine #gaza #free palestine #free gaza #I know I don't post about it much on here #it's largely because I don't want to sound disingenuous regarding the matter #so hopefully this list amounts to something for someone

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onemonitarsoftware · 29 days ago

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Track Smarter with ONEMONITAR Call Tracker!

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Ideal for businesses of all sizes aiming to improve communication, customer service, and sales performance.

📞 Get Started Today with ONEMONITAR!

#call tracker #call tracker app #call history tracker #call tracker online #mobile number tracker call history #phone call tracker #mobile number call tracker #mobile call tracker #WhatsApp call tracker #call tracker login #phone call tracker app #call & message tracker #message and call tracker

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sunnetrolls · 2 years ago

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Rampage

gdoc for those who don't wanna read in red on red

characters: PR0T0TYPE; G0DKILLR, Dziban, and Vrayan mentioned word count: 779

You were perched atop a tall office building when you received the notification.

Sometime this week you and the squad had a hit to carry out, and it was always your job to scout out the locations Dziban came up with to see what was the most viable for an operation. This was already the third building the target would be readily ‘accessible’ from and nothing had seemed very promising so far, but at that very moment scouting out the next locations would have to be put on the backburner.

At the same time, your moirail was meeting with a ‘contact’ of hers in some alleyway halfway across town. These types of operations always made you nervous, since she was very obviously a mutant and, regardless of her ability to defend herself, did appear like one hell of a target for a particularly bitchy highblood. You usually kept her phone’s location map open while she was carrying out those meetings just in case something went wrong.

Like now, for example.

You receive a notification that Vrayan’s GPS signal can no longer be traced. Her phone battery also dropped to zero at the same time. Of course, the GPS signals from most mobile phones would keep functioning even after the phone’s battery was dead, or if it was powered off, so you figured both of these indicators happening at once meant really only one thing: someone had just busted the thing.

Which would be very, very bad. You freeze for a moment, trying to process this information. What the fuck do you do about this? Call someone? Try and find her? Yeah, that sounds good. You finally leap back into action, sending a very very quick text to Nyctea, Dziban and Icarus-- the former to warn of danger, and the latter two to let them know you’ll be a little late.

0̷̻͚͒̕0̴̬̍̃ : HELP 0̷̻͚͒̕0̴̬̍̃ : VRAY IN DANGER You send the last pinged location from her phone as you race across the rooftops, dropped down on all fours like some sort of awful mechanical beast. It’s faster and safer to run like this, you know you won’t fall off anything or miscalculate your jumps.

You’re grateful for once in your life that you run on an engine. You don’t have to stop and catch your breath for a single moment, each of which already feeling agonizingly long as you approach that alleyway. You’re even grateful for your mechanical legs, which won’t get tired no matter how many times you make jumps between the sunbleached rooftops. You’re especially grateful for your weird sort of sonar-adjacent sensory program that lets you bolt between obstacles and over ledges with more accuracy than someone who wasn’t blind.

Maybe sometimes all those augmentations do come in a little handy, you guess.

Despite how much distance you were covering, it still felt like your location indicator was crawling across your GPS app like a snail. What if she had gotten in serious trouble and you were too slow? What if you had to be the one to bring her corpse back to Nyctea’s hive, desperately explaining that you weren’t the one to kill her?

You would be, though. Because you were too slow.

You don’t want to think about that. She’s tougher than she looks.

You start to slow down as you approach her last pinged location. Now you need to focus on finding her, not her bricked phone-- which you find in the alleyway, smashed far beyond repair. Oh no.

You turn off the GPS tracker to free up more space for sensory programs, everything up to 11. Vrayan is clearly not here right now, but it doesn’t take you long to figure out where she went-- her blood is stained on the nails embedded in an old rotten board sticking out of a trashcan. You can easily smell it on the ground after that, tracking her path through the mazelike network of one-way streets and alleyways between buildings before you come to a wall. There’s more blood here, like it was dripping for a longer time, so you suspect the way is up; you crouch down like a cat to spring halfway up the wall then easily scale the rest.

You sense them both immediately. One figure is large, imposing, cold-- well, cold in some places, hot in others. Odd. The other is your moirail, pinned on her stomach and laying in her own blood. Her speeding heart rate is doing nothing to help the blood loss, but everything to fuel the rage you feel for the man doing this to her.

Your claws scrape loudly on the concrete roof as you pull yourself up.

#grimrrarts #PR0T0TYPE things #pulsus ferus #whats up guys shit is going down 👍

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Tiktok's enshittification

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

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/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

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

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

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

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

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

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “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.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

#pluralistic #Lauren Leffer #tiktok #surplus allocation #fauximation #potemkin ai #the algorithm #creative labor #algorithms exposed #enshittification #bytedance #giant teddy bears #convincers #big store con #pivot to video #scissor bucket #Emily Baker-White

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vishal6x · 1 year ago

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How do Parental Spy apps track children's online activity?

Parental spy apps are a tool that give parents the privilege to track their children’s online activity. They also allow parents to control and set certain limits to these activities but that depends on the features and other factors based on which one can perform these activities.

Today, the kids are technologically very advanced. Every kid is equipped with smartphones and also has a presence on the internet. This is the reason why parents are so concerned about their safety and monitoring children’s online behavior has become crucial for them.

In this article, we will read about how these spy apps function for your child’s online activity tracking and assuring the internet safety for kids and your loved ones.

What Are Parental Spy Apps?

As mentioned above parental Spy apps are a tool with the help of which you can track your loved ones’ online activity. You can view the content they watch, the people they interact with, their real-time location. You can also block the websites that you think are not right for them and much more.

There are numerous phone monitoring apps available on the internet that you will find, some could be free while most of them would be paid apps. Usually, the free apps offer less features and security as compared to the paid apps. Also, despite offering similar services, different spy apps would have something different in them in terms of features, packages, and performance.

We will now read about the features that are commonly offered by the mobile spy apps that can help you track your child’s online behavior.

Features Of A Phone Spy App

There are many features offered by a phone spy app that are helpful in tracking your child and also allow you to take certain actions based on what the kid is doing. Let us learn more about these features.

Call Recorder: The hidden call recorder is an effective feature when you want to remotely listen to the calls of the concerned person. Not only you can listen to the calls but also get the information of the complete log that provides you the details of the other person on the call also like their name and phone number.

Location Tracker: You can remotely track your child when you want to know about their whereabouts. The GPS tracking feature shares accurate and timely information.

Social Media Monitoring: To track your child’s social media, you can use the social media tracking tool that allows you to see their activity on the social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Web Browser History: The websites your child visits is a major concern for parents and to ensure that, you can access their web browsing history with a spy app for android.

Website Blocking: You can block the websites that you think are not supposed to be viewed by your child by remotely blocking the site through certain settings.

Screen-Time Management: Most of the digital parenting tools allow you to manage the screen-time of your child so that you can ensure that they are not spending too much time in front of the screen.

How Are Digital Parenting Tools Helpful?

The digital parenting tools are the software that you need in today’s digitally advanced times. Digital parenting is the solution for digital children. The features mentioned above are not only beneficial when you have tried most of the resources available to look after your child when nothing works, but also when you intentionally want to monitor everything your child does on their phone.

We will discuss how these mentioned features can help in digital parenting. Starting from the call recording feature, this feature works well when your child is constantly on calls and won’t let you around them when they are talking on the phone. With the help of the hidden call recorder, you can remotely listen to your child along with the other person talking to them. Once the call is completed, the mobile spy app will store all the information on the dashboard.

The other feature that parents commonly look for in a phone spy app is the live location tracker. This feature allows you to view the real-time location of your child to ensure that they are exactly where they are supposed to be. Usually children lie about their whereabouts and that is when this feature comes in handy.

Today, every child is on social media and we know how impactful this platform is in both positive and negative ways. While some children find it cool to be on social media, other kids are there just because of the peer pressure. Whatever the reason is, the bottom line is that all the children are online. In the online world, all types of people are present and there are also people who wish to harm others digitally leading to a traumatizing experience also in some cases, so it is important that parents use the digital monitoring tools to ensure their children’s safety.

When new to the internet, kids would want to explore everything they see online. They may also see content that is not age-appropriate. Later on, this may become a habit to view the violating content that can turn into serious addiction. To ensure that they do not watch anything inappropriate, one can use the web browsing history tracker to see which websites the kids are visiting and if you think that it is inappropriate then you can also immediately block them, restricting your kids to not be able to watch any exploiting content.

The Spy App You Need

There are multiple apps available on the internet that provide parental monitoring but be sure to invest in an app that delivers results. Phone spy apps like Onemonitar has shown great results as it is one of the most trusted spy app providers with more than 60 features. There are basic to premium plans that you can choose from as per your requirements and the support team at service also guides you through the process from choosing the right plan for you to installation of the spyware.

The support team is also available through live-chats, emails and calls and if requested, they can also install the application on the target phone remotely for you. With so many facilities and features it is safe to say that Onemonitar can be the right choice for your digital monitoring needs.

In The End

The parental control apps are a valuable and beneficial tool when it comes to monitoring your children’s online activity as they give you proper insights of how your child is using the internet. It is also considered a more relaxed and approachable way to parenting in today’s times.

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