#Trying to remove them from all streaming services and history as if they didn’t exist? Bad

[lionblaze03-2]

Yknow I sort of understand why they essentially erased Pepe le pew from looney toons history even though I disagree with trying to wipe art for any reasons but. What did speedy Gonzales do. Didn’t a ton of Latino people come out and say they weren’t offended by him. Rip little mouse

[6ad6ro]

there's a lot of posts about piracy going around rn. so here's mine:

anti-piracy arguments are almost always classist. you shouldn't need to be rich to be happy. we were all born into capitalism. it's not voluntary. many of us don't have parents or other support networks keeping us afloat. poor people still deserve to have nice things. i could care less about keeping a system running smoothly that keeps most people poor and only few people rich.

if you work a shitty, low-paying job, then a simple monthly streaming service fee is YES actually too much to ask. no i don't care if your fav big company loses "potential" money from people who couldn't afford to buy them to begin with.

if there wasn't such a thing as "poverty"? if people could generally AFFORD to go out and easily get the things they want and need? obviously piracy wouldn’t be much of an issue at all. it's always frustrating to hear anti-piracy arguments from people who ignore how CRAZY expensive cost of living has become. again, usually the biggest anti-piracy peeps are either naive rich kids (who have things paid for), rich ppl who STAY rich by keeping things broken like they are, and the poor people they’ve brainwashed into being submissive hosts to their parasitic behavior.

in a world like this, where people are overworked and tired? with very few tangible goals available in their future? people NEED entertainment to stay sane. it's literally a mental health issue. yes, in a way, you NEED that funny show to inspire yourself to keep going. that game you can't afford otherwise? will help you relax after a hard day. don't let some disney mouthpiece tell you shouldn't download lion king if it'd help calm you down, especially when the people running that company could probably afford to have a private zoo in their backyard.

there's ALSO the big issue of control. as companies move further and further into streaming and cloud technologies? ownership has become a huge issue. greedy companies are finding more and more ways to nickel and dime people over long periods of time rather than get a one-time fee. it makes them more money, they don't have to actually GIVE customers anything (copies of data are free to them). and customers are left with nothing to show for it after-the-fact. this means that even though entertainment is being produced way more than the past? i’d argue people have LESS access to the entertainment they want for how much they’re paying. because it’s all temporary.

drm and limited use is becoming a norm. meaning? it's harder and harder for people to "own" their favorite things even if they COULD afford it. your favorite movie might simply cease to exist in 20 years. your favorite game might become nothing but a fragmented memory.

"piracy" solves this. backups. ownership. it takes control away from companies who abused that power. and puts it back in your hands. when nintendo stopped making their back catalogue available? and went around shutting down all the emulation sites? i was thankfully in the clear. because i download and archived many of my favorite things. in many cases i own cartridges of my favorite games already? but those can break, or in my case, get caught in a flood. but due to piracy, i can still play "mario 64" to pull myself away from suicidal thoughts. and i'm not limited by nintendo randomly deciding to remove it from the switch store and take the cartridges off of store shelves? in order to drive up their yearly profit via copycatting the methods used for the "disney vault" scam (look it up).

i am someone who tends to enjoy things from other countries. but it can be INCREDIBLY restrictive to try to go through "official" channels attempting to pay for them. if i want that old, relatively unpopular 80s japanese prog rock album? i'm just stuck. i HAVE to hope someone is sharing it online. but this often applies to new things as well. "licensing" is generally INCREDIBLY stupid, especially when it comes to other regions. do you REALLY want simple licensing issues to stand between you and your potential new favorite anime? and in many cases, the distributors just don't care enough to make the thing available globally. and no, i don't think this should mean we all just "miss out".

one of the biggest issues we are experiencing online at the moment? is one of censorship. governmental censorship, religious censorship, and maybe worst of all? corporate censorship. i'm not talking about "bring back racist imagery" etc (but that DOES play a part). i'm more talking... rewriting history. edits. removal. for example, it shouldn't be left to some corporation to decide whether or not a sex scene in a movie is deemed "too racy" for today's audience. if somebody creates an amazing album, but then commits some awful unrelated act later, that shouldn't mean that album should be made unavailable. in many cases, old media can even TEACH us what NOT to do. we gain nothing by erasing history. and corporations are never doing it to be moral. they're only following required guidelines in order to maximize profit. “fake showings of morality” to keep up appearances and keep all potential buyers buying. piracy can give you the OPTION of access to unedited works, or things that have been removed from circulation.

piracy can negate corporate control and artificial-scarcity. create opportunities for absorbing other culture's art without having to deal with availability issues in your country. it circumvents corporate and governmental censorship. and helps you archive the art that makes your life worth living.

finally... the "but it's stealing and stealing is wrong" argument is invalidated by the fact that, by ANY moral compass? these companies are STEALING from US. constantly. by a LOT. look at the way any big company is run. the way it leeches off of it's customer base. the offshore tax havens... does THAT seem okay to YOU?! if someone went around stealing all the food and locking it up, would you REALLY consider "breaking in" to get some so that u didn't starve as "stealing"? don't pretend that you don't NEED escapism and entertainment to get by. you know that you do.

the only people that piracy COULD hurt? is small, independent artists. who, if you actually listen to them, would rather you send them money directly? or buy merch. etc. because companies usually take SUCH an awful cut that it’s better to find alternate ways of supporting them. if you use reasonable context with what you decide to download and share? it’s fine! like i might buy a depeche mode vinyl or two? or a shirt. or go to a concert. but i’ll pirate that $1000 rare box set. because i just can’t AFFORD that kind of excess. and my income doesn’t dictate how big of a fan i am of their music. as long as you chip in when you can to your favorite creators? it’s actually fine. if i didn’t pirate, i wouldn’t be into 95% of the artists i’m currently into. i’ve spent so much on media that it’s almost embarrassing... my argument might not be entirely black and white? but i can safely say that piracy’s positives GREATLY outweigh it’s negatives. most research done has shown time and time again that it doesn’t really hurt creators. if anything, it’s the way greedy companies REACT to the idea of file sharing that hurts those creators. it really is an argument of big corporations trying to make sure they keep ALL the money. and it has almost nothing to do with art or artist’s rights. so please keep sharing everything. download away. for the sake of your own sanity, and generations down the line. because corporations don’t care about you. they don’t care about artists. and they don’t care about maintaining easy access to the art. they just want money, regardless of the cost to everyone else’s happiness. and if you can afford to PAY for it regularly? you should consider yourself very lucky. so maybe stop shitting all over poor people who unfairly have less access to what you already have. everybody deserves to be happy.

[creativitycache]

ngl asking for people who self-identify as "antis" is already biasing your results because the term originated from fans being defensive over getting called out (eg the types who sincerely think fandom culture is ""puritan""). fair number of people started to use the term ironically and it might be evening out but overall the post calling for responses on the survey still comes off as something written in bad faith?

I wrote a rather long and involved response and then tumblr ate it. Goshdarn.

Fair warning, this is a hyperfixation and I’m coming off of a migraine so this may not be very cogent. Please read this in the over excited tones of someone infodumping about emulsifiers, with no animosity intended.

So, tl;dr and with a lot fewer links, I’m incredibly interested by your perspective that “anti” originated as a derogatory term.

As far as I am aware, the etymological history of the word “anti” being used pejoratively is coming from some very new debates.

I’m also noting that you had no feedback regarding the content of the questions themselves, which I would be interested in hearing as I am genuinely coming from a place without censure.

The term “anti” actually is a self-descriptor that arose in the Livejournal days, where you’d tag something as “Anti ___” for other like minded people to find. (For example, my cursory google search pulled up 10 Anti Amy Lee communities on LJ).

I’m a self-confessed old. I was back in fandom before Livejournal, aaaall the way back in the Angelfire days. Webrings children! We had webrings! And guest books for you to sign!

I’m going to take a swing for the fences here Anon, so if I’m wrong please let me know, but I’m going to guess you became active as a fan in the past 5-8 years based of your use of the term puritan.

There’s actually a HUGELY new debate in fandom spaces! Previously, it was assumed that:

a) All fandom spaces are created and used by adults only.

b) If you were seeing something, it’s because you dug for it.

These assumptions were predicated upon what spaces fandoms grew in. First you had Star Trek TOS fandom, which grew in 1970s housewives kitchens. They were all friends irl, and everyone was an adult, and you actively had to reach out to other adults to talk about things. (By the way- a woman lost custody of her children in the divorce when her ex husband brought up to the judge she kept a Kirk/Spock zine under her bed. The judge ruled this as obvious signs of moral deficiency. That was in the 80s! Everyone is still alive and the parents are younger than my coworkers!)

Time: 1967-1980s. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Then, when the internet came about, it was almost exclusively used by adults until The Eternal September. 1993 was the year that changed the internet for good, but even years after that the internet was a majority adult space. Most kids and teens didn’t have unlimited access if their parents even had a home computer in the 90s.

This is the rise of Angelfire, which were fansites all connected to each other in “rings”. You had to hunt for content. If you found something you didn’t like, well, you clicked out and went on with your day because you’d never see it again unless you really dug. This was truly the wild west, tagging did not exist and you could go from fluff to vore in the blink of an eye with nothing warning you before hand. All fannish spaces were marked “here be dragons” and attempts were made to at least adopt the “R/NC-17″ ratings on works to some limited success, depending on webmaster.

Time: 1990-1999. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

In 1999 LiveJournal arose like a leviathan, and here is where the term Anti emerges as a self descriptor. Larger communities began to form, and with them, divisions. Now, you could reach so many fans you could reach a critical mass of them for enough of them to dislike a ship. The phrase “Anti” became a self-used tag, as people tagged their works, communities, and blogs with “anti” (NB: this is at far, far smaller rates than today). Anti was first and foremost a tagging tool used and created by the people who were vehemently against something.

You could find content more easily than in the past, but you still had to put some serious elbow grease into it.

In 2007, Livejournal bans users for art "depicting minors in explicit sexual situations”. The Livejournal community explodes in anger- towards Livejournal staff. The account holders/fans view this as corporate puritanical meddling. The outrage continues as it is revealed these bans were part of a pre-sale operation to SUP Services. SUP Services, upon taking over Livejournal in 2008, proceeds to filter the topics “bisexuality, depression, faeries, girls, boys, and fanfiction”.

The Great LiveJournal Migration begins, as fans leave the site in droves.

Time: 1999-2009. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing, seeking to create communities based off a dislike of something. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Where do fans go? Well, in the last decade, they migrated to Tumblr and Twitter (sorry Pillowfort- you gave it a good try!)

What’s different about all of these sites? Individuals are able to create and access content streams. These are hugely impactful in how communities are formed! Because now:

a) finding content is easier

b) finding content you dislike by accident is easier

c) content you dislike requires active curation to avoid

d) truly anonymous outreach is possible and easy (for example, you anon! Isn’t it much easier to go on anon to bring up awkward or sensitive topics? I’m happy you did by the way, and that’s why I keep my anons open. It’s an important contextual tool in the online communications world!)

Now the term Anti gets sprightly. Previously, if you didn’t like content, there was nothing you could really do about it. For example, I, at the tender age of way-too-young, opened up a page of my favorite Star Trek Deep Space 9 fansite and pixel by pixel with all the loading speed of a stoned turtle a very anatomically incorrect orgy appeared.

I backed out.

1. Who could I contact? There was no “message me here” button, no way to summon any mods on Angelfire sites.

2. If I did manage to find a contact button, I would have had to admit I went onto a site that wasn’t designed to keep me safe. I knew this was a site for adults, I knew there wasn’t a way to stop it from showing something. There was no such thing as tags. I knew all of this before going in. So the assumption was, it was on me for looking. (Some may have argued it was on my parents for not supervising me- all I can say is thank GOD no one else was in the living room and my mom was around the corner in the kitchen.)

But now? On Tumblr? On Twitter? In a decade in which tagging is so easy and ubiquitous it’s expected?

Now people who describe themselves as antis start to have actual tools and social conventions to utilize.

Which leads to immediate backlash! Content creators are confused and upset- fandom spaces have been the wild west for decades, and there’s still no sherriff in town. So the immediate go-to argument is that these people who are messaging them are “puritans”.

And that’s actually an interesting argument! A huge factor in shaping the internet’s social mores in the latest decades is cleanliness for stockbrokers. Websites can become toxic to investors and to sales if they contain sexual content. Over time, corporations perfected a mechanism for “cleaning” a site for sale.

Please note there is no personal opinion or judgement in this next list, it is simply a description of corporate strategies you can read during the minute meetings of shareholders for Tumblr, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Answers, and Livejournal.

1. Remove sex workers. Ban any sex work of any kind, deplatform, keep any money you may have been holding.

2. Remove pedophilia. This is where the jump begins between content depicting real people vs content depicting fictional characters begins.

3. Remove all sexual image content, including artwork of fictional characters.

4. Remove all sexual content, including written works. If needed, loop back to step 2 as a justification, and claim you do not have the moderators to prevent written works depicting children.

I would like to reiterate these are actual gameplans, so much so that they’ve made their way into business textbooks. (Or at least they did for my Modern Marketing & App Design classes back in the early 2010s. Venmo, of course, wasn’t mentioned, but I did read the shareholder’s speeches when they banned sex workers from the platform so I added them in the list above because it seems they’re following the same pattern.)

So you have two groups who are actively seeking to remove NSFW content from the site.

A) Corporate shareholders

B) People are upset they’re seeing NSFW content they didn’t seek out and squicks them

Now, why does this matter for the debates using the term “puritan” as an insult? 

Because the reasons corporate shareholders hate NSFW material is founded in American puritanism. It’s a really interesting conflation of private sector values! And if Wall Street were in another cultural context, it would be a completely different discussion which I find fascinating!

But here’s the rub- that second group? They're not doing this for money. If there are any puritanical drives, it’s personal, not a widespread cohesive ideology driving them. HOWEVER! The section of that group that spent the early 2010s on tumblr did pick up some of the same rhetoric as puritanical talking points (which is an entirely separate discussion involving radfems, 4chan raids, fourth wave feminism, and a huge very nuanced set of influences I would love to talk about at a later time!)

These are largely fans who have “grown up” in the modern sites- no matter how old they actually are, their fandom habits and expectations have been shaped by the algorithms of these modern sites.

Now HERE‘s the fascinating bit that’s new to me! This is the interpretation of the data I’m getting, and so I’m out on a limb but I think this is a valid premise!

The major conflict in fandom at this time is a struggle over personal space online.

Content creators are getting messages telling them to stop, degrading them, following them from platform to platform.

They say “Hey! What gives- we were here first. The cardinal rule of fandom is don’t like, don’t read. Fandom space has always been understood to be adult- it’s been this way for decades! To find our content, you had to come to us! This is our space! This is my space, this is my blog! If you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to look!”

Meanwhile, at the exact same time, antis are saying “Hey! What gives- this content is appearing on my screen! That’s my space!  I didn’t agree to this, I don’t like this! I want it to be as far away from me as possible! I will actively drive it away.”

This is a major cultural shift! This is a huge change and a huge source of friction! And I directly credit it to the concept of “content stream” and algorithms driving similar-content to users despite them not wanting it!

Curating your online space used to be much simpler, because there wasn’t much of it! Now with millions of users spread out over a wide age range, all feeding in to the same 4-5 websites, we are seeing people be cramped in a technically limitless space!

Now people feel that they have to go on the offense to defend themselves against content they don’t like, which is predicated upon not only the algorithms of modern websites but ALSO talking points fed from the top down of what is and what is not acceptable on various platforms.

Time: 2010-2020. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing,and people using it to describe others. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? Depends!

So I, a fandom ancient, a creaky thing of old HTML codes and broken tags, am watching this transformation and am wildly curious for data.

Also...I uh....I can’t believe this is the short version. My ADHD is how you say “buckwild” tonight.

Anyways...um...if anyone has read to the bottom, give me data?

[squidgytoebeans]

The Telstra Saga Continues.

If you’ve been following me long enough, you’ll probably know all about the issues hubby and I have been having with Telstra, one of the largest telecommunications providers here in Australia.

Buckle up folks, it’s gonna be a long one...

If you already know the backstory you can skip to the section after the sentence “So here’s where the new nonsense starts” for the new gory details.

We were without internet for almost three months when we first moved here because the previous tenant had no cancelled her account after she moved out. Then, even though we had documented proof that we live here now, when they rang her to ask if they could disconnect the line, she said she still lived here... because she didn’t wanna pay the $178 bill. For three months this woman held out phone/internet line hostage and Telstra, who own the line, said they couldn’t do anything about it. Anyway, ancient history, that problem was solved eventually when she finally gave them a date of when she was “going to move out”.

Then for over 12 months after that we battled with them over a slow connection that they kept telling us was “fine on their end” and refusing to send a technician out. Then when they finally caved and sent someone out that man was incredibly rude and sexist towards me (rolling his eyes at my husband every time I spoke even though I have a Diploma in IT and know more about these kinds of things than my husband) and didn’t touch a single thing when he was here. All he did was reiterated the default stance of “Everything looks fine on our end, there’s nothing I can do”.

In the end we made a complaint to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (which costs Telstra $3000 every time someone makes a complaint regardless of what said complain is) and they managed to force Telstra to send out another technician... who called 10 minutes before he was supposed to be here and said, and I quote, “Everything looks fine on our end, I don’t see any reason to come there. Besides, I have a corporate client that I have to deal with today and the big guys are more important, you know?”.

So I rang our case handler at the TIO and they told them if they didn’t get a technician out here asap, the fines would get bigger and they’d be in a lot more trouble. The next day a technician actually showed up (this one was surprisingly really nice!) and it took him literally two minutes to find the problem. All he did was poke the modem once, the internet cut out, and he didn’t need to do anything else to figure it out. Literally all he had to do was touch the modem with the tip of his finger. 12 months. OVER 12 months, and not a single person bothered to think “maybe the modem is faulty”. He replaced the modem on the spot, and the cables just in case, and problem solved.

Telstra also refused to compensate us in any way for the 12+ months of pathetic internet service (we literally couldn’t even load Gmail at all) and disgusting customer service, so that was cool too, but whatever the problem was solved and that’s really all I wanted.

So here’s where the new nonsense starts.

Cut to about 6 months later with no problems and it’s time for hubby and I to get new mobile phones; our contracts are almost up and they sent us a message saying we could take advantage of their new swap and go lease where all we have to do is give our old phones back and we get brand new ones for $0. So we decided to head down to the local Telstra shop to get ourselves a couple of brand new Samsung S9s, because why not.

During the process I decided to go for the S9 Edge (hubby got the standard S9). I was little bit hesitant about it because it was an extra $20 a month and our bill with them was already quite big with our landline (which we never use but we have to have to get internet), internet and cable all being bundled through them. However, after looking at our account, the sales assistant (if I could remember his name I would 100% put him on blast right now but I can’t) looked through out account and said “I see you guys don’t use your landline at all, why don’t I drop that down to the $79 plan from $95 and you can make up the extra that way?”.

Now, pay attention because this is key the part right here.

Because we’ve had so many problems with Telstra in the past, I said to him “Will that affect anything else in the bundle?” and his reply was, and again I quote, “Nope, it’ll just drop your landline bundle so that you don’t have as much calls available each month but you never use it so that should be fine.” Alright, cool, we changed everything over and went on our way, happy with our new phones.

Oh how naive we were.

The next month when the bill arrives... it’s almost twice would it should be! We were expecting a large bill because hubby’s phone screen was cracked and they had to charge us for that, but not THAT big a bill! But, we weren’t able to access the bill online for some reason so we ended up having to ring them to find out wtf was going on.

Turns out sales douche didn’t change our landline plan, no no, he added it on top of the already existing one! So they were trying to not only charge us for the old $99 plan, but the new $79 one too, as though we had two landlines in the house! It was also during this phone call that we found out that, contrary to what sales douche told us, our internet HAD been affect by the change in plan; it went from unlimited data usage to 1500gb a month. That may not seem like a big deal, and it’s not really because we never even use that much, but when someone tells you a change isn’t going to affect anything; you believe them!  But again, whatever, the problem was solved, the charge for the extra landline was removed from our account and we paid the bill.

It was also during this call that we decided to cancel our cable TV. We never watch it and it’s just a waste of money, so we told them to cut it off and we sent the box back.

Cut to another month later, and our bill comes again... or rather it doesn’t. We get a notification saying the bill is ready to be viewed and we can see the total — WHICH IS WRONG AGAIN — but yet again, we can’t access the actual bill to see why it’s wrong. Another call, another “oh dear, we forgot to remove the charge for the cable” and it’s “fixed” again.

Are you seeing the pattern yet?

At this point, I’m beginning to feel sorry for the poor people who have unwittingly set up direct debits with Telstra and don’t bother to look at their bills before they’re charged, how many of those poor people have been ripped off by these arseholes this way?

So about a week ago I get another notification telling me this month’s bill is ready ... and we can’t access the full bill again. And yet again it’s wrong! They STILL haven’t taken off the cable even though we cancelled it and sent the box back almost two months ago. Why am I not surprised? It seems another call is in order and hell, while we’re at it, why don’t we find out why tf we can never seem to access our bill and also complain about the slowness of the internet that’s happening yet again the past few months.

Here’s where it get hilariously fucking annoying and aggravating...

Turns out the reason we can’t access our bills everyone month is because of something sales douche did when he was changing our plan. No one knows what he did or how he managed to fuck it up so badly, but whenever the automated process that handles credits tries to credit off the cable every month it can’t and then it keeps getting stuck in a loop of trying to fix itself and I keep getting notifications saying the bill is ready when it’s not.

Oh but it gets better... remember when sales douche said dropping the landline down to the lower plan wouldn’t affect anything else on our account, just the landline? Lies. Utter lies. Not only did it drop back our data allowance as I mentioned before... BUT IT ALSO DROPPED OUR CONNECTION TO A LOWER SPEED! Now, call me crazy but that seems like it’s affecting more than the landline doesn’t it? I’m pretty certain during the hours it took him to set up our new phones I even told him about all the issues we’d had with Telstra in the past and that the reason I wanted the Galaxy S9 Edge was because it came with a larger data plan, which I needed because our home connection was too slow to stream. I’d like to know in what universe he thought we would be ok with dropping our fucking connection speed!? Was he high!? Or was he just like every other damn Telstra employee who knows sweet fuck all about what they’re talking about because the company is a piece of shit? That sounds about right to me.

So now, we can either deal with the slower speed, or we can pay an extra $10 a month to go onto a faster speed that claims it will give us up to 45mbps which sounds fantastic because that’s like 4x the speed we had before all of this BUT if you’re Australian you’ll know that that “UP TO” part is a key marketing strategy with Telstra. Sure you MIGHT get up to that speed... if you live in the middle of a large city or right on top of an exchange, but even then it’s highly unlikely. No one EVER gets the speeds they’re promised from Telstra.

Now I know what you’re thinking, why not ditch Telstra and go with a different provider? Oh, my sweet summer child, if only it were that simple. Telstra is the largest communications industry in Australia and as shocking as it may be to believe, Telstra is the most reliable of all of them all. Their cell service has better range than any of them (which is important when you live in a rural area like we do) and even if we went with another company, there would be no guarantee we’d get a more stable internet connection because Telstra literally own all of the lines and the other companies simply rent them. There’s a reason you might hear many Australians complain about the internet, and that’s because Australia literally has worse internet than some third-world countries and we pay through the nose for it.

I did warn you about it being a long one didn’t I? lol So all we can do now is wait and see if the this supposedly faster 45mbps is actually what they say and go from there and if it’s not... someone is going to lose an eye.

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Behind The Album: In Rainbows

In October 2007, Radiohead released their seventh studio album in a self-released pay whatever download release. A physical release would later be distributed via XL Recordings. The band had gone completely independent after the completion of their contract with EMI Records. In 2004, they went on a long break following the end of the tour in support of Hail To the Thief. Phil Selway would comment on this hiatus. “It was definitely time to take a break. There was still a desire amongst us to make music, but also a realisation that other aspects of our lives were being neglected. And we'd come to the end of our contract, which gives you a natural point to look back over at what you've achieved as a band." During this time, Thom Yorke released his first solo album The Eraser, while Jonny Greenwood scored his first two film projects. Writing for In Rainbows began in early 2005 with the decision to work with a producer besides Nigel Godrich. The reason for this decision is a point of contention between band members on whether the group wanted to hear a new voice or Godrich was simply too busy with other projects. In August, the band began recording sessions as they updated their progress on Dead Space, the group’s official blog. Progress on the album was very slow as Thom Yorke would later explain. “We spent a long time in the studio just not going anywhere, wasting our time, and that was really, really frustrating." A variety of reasons have been given for the studio issues including the long hiatus, no deadline, and the fact they had all become fathers. Ed O’Brien would say that breaking up was actually considered at the time, but kept going “because when you got beyond all the shit and the bollocks, the core of these songs were really good.” In December, Radiohead hired Skip Stent to produce the new release, who had previously worked with Bjork and U2. He did not last very long as the producer told them their recordings so far were not good enough. In order to try and create some positive energy for In Rainbows, the group decided to tour in May and June of 2006. The live shows helped immensely as Thom Yorke would say, “We basically had all these half-formed songs, and we just had to get it together. And rather than it being a nightmare, it was really, really good fun, because suddenly everyone is being spontaneous and no one's self-conscious because you're not in the studio ... It felt like being 16 again." After the tour, they brought Nigel Godrich back in to produce the record, which according to Yorke definitely helped them to get focused quickly. Recording started up again at a country house in Wiltshire, England, which had some productive sessions. The house was very odd as Yorke would describe it for the media. It was “derelict in the stricter sense of the word, where there's holes in the floor, rain coming through the ceilings, half the window panes missing ... There were places you just basically didn't go. It definitely had an effect. It had some pretty strange vibes." These October sessions produced “Bodysnatchers'' and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” as Yorke would post that the album was well on its way now. In December 2006, the sessions moved to Godrich’s home studio in Covent Garden in London. The band completed “Nude” and “Videotape” during this time before moving on to Radiohead’s home studio in Oxfordshire. The LP would finally be completed in June 2007. One of the major priorities for In Rainbows was that the record needed to be “concise” as they felt Hail To the Thief had been too long and bloated. Thom Yorke would observe, “I believe in the rock album as an artistic form of expression. In Rainbows is a conscious return to this form of 45-minute statement ... Our aim was to describe in 45 minutes, as coherently and conclusively as possible, what moves us." The sessions had produced 16 tracks, but the band decided on ten with the intention of releasing the others on a second disc at a later date.

In Rainbows represented art rock, electronica, and experimental rock. The opening track “15 Step” was actually inspired by the Peaches song, “Fuck The Pain Away.” “Nude” had actually been initially written during the sessions for OK Computer, but never used. Colin Greenwood rewrote the bassline making it much more appropriate for In Rainbows. Although the group performed a song entitled Reckoner in 2001, the In Rainbows “Reckoner” only has the title in common because they exist as two different songs. “Bodysnatchers” would be described by Yorke as “Wolfmother and Neu! meets dodgy hippy rock.” The most difficult song on the album came in “Videotape,” which Yorke described as “absolute agony.” With the help of Godrich and Jonny Greenwood, the track was made quite minimally into a simple piano ballad. The lyrics on the record were described by the singer as “that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something else' ... it's similar to OK Computer in a way. It's much more terrifying." The record’s central theme represented being human and reaching the conclusion that we are all going to die someday. Yorke would make clear that no part of his lyrics are political in any way on the album. “Bodysnatchers” would be partly inspired by Victorian ghost stories and the 1972 novel, The Stepford Wives. “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” was inspired by the disarray Yorke witnessed when he would go out on the weekends in Oxford. Once again, Stanley Donwood created the cover art for the album, eventually deciding upon an image of a rainbow, but a toxic one at that. The cover art would not be released for the digital version, but only for the physical cd’s and vinyl.

With the release of In Rainbows, Radiohead offered a free download for it in a pay what you want pricing structure. Such a release had never been done before from a group as big as Radiohead. Colin Greenwood would say that the band did this in order to avoid leaks and regulated playlists via radio and iTunes. Thom Yorke explained their logic in an interview with BBC. “We have a moral justification in what we did in the sense that the majors and the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans ... Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash." As for the release itself, the band used a private server network in order to successfully distribute the ZIP file to fans. The file would be a DRM free 160 kB download, but diehard audiophile fans would complain that they wanted a file with more kB. After two months, the download was removed, but you could still get the album in a physical format through XL Recordings primarily. The band eliminated any thought of making it a download only release because they wanted a physical object to give to fans. In Rainbows emerged as the first release from the band to be made available on streaming services like Amazon and iTunes. The band retained all rights to the master recordings, while record labels would need to obtain a license from the group in order to use any part of the record. The pay what you want structure created quite a stir within the music world with some applauding it, while others criticized the move. Mojo would call it a revolution in the way new music is released. Time called it “easily the most important release in the history of the music business.” New Musical Express praised the band for bringing together everyone at the same time to hear new music. U2 complimented Radiohead for their courage and imagination in trying to create a new way to speak to the audience. Despite all of this praise, the release did have several detractors, most notably musicians. Lily Allen felt that it sent the wrong message to less successful artists that you will need to give away your music for free in order to get anywhere with an audience. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon said the same thing noting that it essentially made everyone else look bad for not giving their music away for free. Guardian journalist Will Hodgkinson commented that Radiohead had decimated the playing field for everyone else with this move. U2’s manager would even argue that 60-70 percent of Radiohead fans pirated the record via torrent. In retrospect, the band never used the same pricing structure ever again for any release making pay what you want an experiment, and nothing more. In 2013, Thom Yorke admitted that they might have been doing what companies like Apple and Google wanted all along when you consider the current state of streaming music.

If the controversy over a pay what you want release was not enough, the band also battled with EMI over In Rainbows. In August 2007, EMI was purchased by the company Terra Firma and new owner Guy Hands. Radiohead was on the verge of completing the record when Hands made a visit. They had hoped to re-sign the group, but suffered a major disappointment when they learned of the decision to self release the record. Ed O’Brien said the group did not realize their importance to the company, while Hands believed only a big offer would persuade Radiohead to sign a new deal. O’Brien would later say, “It was really sad to leave all the people [we'd worked with] ... But Terra Firma don't understand the music industry." The real sticking point came in the fact that Terra Firma refused to give the band control of their master recordings. Thom Yorke would later deny Terra Firma’s claim that the band wanted an extraordinary amount of money. A week after the group released a special edition of In Rainbows, EMI released a boxed set of material recorded by the band during the time of their contract. The Guardian would call it revenge for not signing with the label.

Most critics praised In Rainbows across the board. Many reviews noted the fact that the quality of the release was not overshadowed by the significance of the pay what you want structure. New Musical Express would comment, “Radiohead reconnecting with their human sides, realising you [can] embrace pop melodies and proper instruments while still sounding like paranoid androids ... this [is] otherworldly music, alright." Rob Sheffield would observe that there were no duds on the album. Other qualities mentioned in various reviews included warmth, beauty, and more human. Robert Christgau would say that there was less Thom Yorke on the album, which turned out to be a good thing. Many end of year best of lists named In Rainbows the number one album of the year including Billboard, Mojo, and Pop Matters. They were ranked in the top five for Pitchfork, AV Club, and Q. Rolling Stone and Spin would put the album sixth on their year end list. The release would be ranked as one of the best of the decade by several publications including New Musical Express, Rolling Stone, Paste, and The Guardian. The LP would go on to be nominated for The Mercury Prize and several Grammys including a win for Best Alternative Record for the latter. As far as sales of the album, those were difficult to gauge due to the unconventional nature of the record’s release. Some research was released providing what the average user actually paid for a download, but Radiohead dismissed the statistics as inaccurate arguing that In Rainbows made more money digitally than any other release combined. According to their music publisher, the physical copies of In Rainbows sold quite well, which Pitchfork observed on their site. “Radiohead could release a record on the most secretive terms, basically for free, and still be wildly successful, even as industry profits continued to plummet.” According to the media measurement company BigChampagne, the release was downloaded illegally 400,000 times. The digital version of the album did not make it eligible for the UK Album Charts, but upon the release of the physical album the release went straight to number one. The album did the same thing in the United States on the Billboard 200. The vinyl version of the LP became the best selling record of 2008. In 2009, the group finally released the second disc for In Rainbows. In his review, David Fricke of Rolling Stone would say that the bonus material was not worth the $80 price tag, but the tracks represent vintage Radiohead. In 2016, the group made the second disc available on all streaming services.

[bravoloading660]

Can You Download Netflix Movies On A Mac

Summary:

Can you download Netflix shows on Mac? Want to watch download Netflix movies on the Mac so you can watch them offline? Here our guide shows how to download Netflix on Mac and introduces you a best data recovery tool to recover your lost data. With over 100 million subscribers worldwide, Netflix is one of the most popular streaming services in existence, and it continues to grow every year. As the most prominent American entertainment provider of Internet streaming media and video-on-demand online and DVD by mail, NetFlix generates incredible shows and movies that can be watched on your TV, Smart TVs, PlayStation, Xbox and so on, and even available to watch instantly or download for later on phone/tablet, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Safari browser.

If you were hoping to download a copy of a Netflix film or TV show on to your Mac - because the service does not offer a download button when viewed on a Mac, unlike the Windows app - you can use. Netflix is the most popular media streaming site specially for Movies and TV Shows. To download shows and movies for offline use on a Windows 10 machine, you first need to download the free Netflix app from the Windows Store; you can’t download anything with Netflix’s web client.

How to download Netflix movies?

To download movies from Netflix on iOS or Android device, you'll need a few things: - An active Netflix subscription; so you can't keep a download after you cancel your subscription. - A device that supports Netflix. However, not all devices that can run Netflix offer this. For this article, we'll focus on the iPad and the Mac.

- A movie or TV shows that has a download option. Most items on Netflix do, but not all. Once you've watched the movie or TV show, or if you didn't view it and want to remove it, tap the Download icon, then tap Delete Download.

Can you download Netflix on Mac?

The answer is still no, unfortunately. Unlike the iPad, downloading Netflix to a Mac is a bit harder since Netflix doesn't support downloading and offline watching on Mac, because Netflix believes people won't use it that way, or because download Netflix movies on the Mac are pirating content, which is illegal. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there’s no malware that targets Mac OS. If you are here because you've visited one of those sites and downloaded a fake version of Netflix, infecting your Mac computer with malware and possibly even losing essential data, we know how annoying it is to lose your profile and the viewing history there because so far there is no NetFlix recovery tool available. So you may need immediately download the best video recovery software to recover them. Bitwar Data Recovery for Mac is a user-friendly data recovery suite for Mac OS that can recover all lost files from any storage device. It can recover lost or deleted files, photos, audio, music from any storage device effectively, safely and completely.

How to recover lost deleted NetFlix profile with Bitwar Data Recovery for Mac?

Unlike the iPad, downloading Netflix to a Mac is a bit harder since Netflix doesn't support downloading and offline watching on Mac, because Netflix believes people won't use it that way, or because download Netflix movies on the Mac are pirating content, which is illegal. Netflix for Mac: How To Download Netflix App on Macbook Netflix is an online streaming platform for viewing Netflix originals shows, films, and a lot of binge-watch shows. Netflix program utilized in Windows, Smartphones, iPad, along with the iPhone. The Netflix program isn’t readily available for Mac. Yes, it is true. If you hunt”Netflix” at. Another 3rd party tool that can help you download Netflix movies on Mac is streaming via other Apple devices. A irPl ay is an additional tool that’s been developed by Apple to help stream media content among AirPlay-enabled devices over Wi-Fi. & since the app supports offline downloading, you can download Netflix movies on Mac quite easily.

Free download and install Bitwar Data Recovery on your Mac OS now. It is compatible with OS X 10.11 and later. Then, follow the steps to perform lost data recovery quickly and safely. Tips: For the latest mac OS 10.13 (High Sierra) system requirements, Mac users are not allowed access to system disk from apps. If you want to recover data from the system disk, please disable the system feature 'System Integrity Protection (SIP),' see the guide on How to Disable System Integrity Protection (SIP) in macOS High Sierra (macOS 10.13)?

Step 1: Select the Partition or Device

Launch the program and select the disk location where your files deleted by Netflix pirating content and then click 'Next.'

Step 2: Select the Scan Mode

The Quick Scan mode can recover deleted files on a partition or device, such as files deleted by Command + delete, deleted by other software, or emptied from the trash, etc. So select 'Quick Scan' and click 'Next.' If files could not be scanned out by 'Quick Scan,' try 'Deep Scan.' Deep scan will search every sector of the hard drive to find all existing files.

Step3: Select the file type

Select the file types to which lost file belongs. Then click 'Next' to perform an automatic scan.

Step 4: Preview, recover and save files

After scanning, by file name and type, you can quickly filter the data you've lost from the trash. And you can also preview them one by one. Then select the ones you want and press the Recover button to have them saved to your Mac. Remember not to keep recovered files in the same place where you lost them.

Conclusion:

Netflix brings a great movie and TV viewing experience to you. If you have an iOS or Android device, you won't have trouble in this area. However, if you installed pirated Netflix on Mac, please use Bitwar Data Recovery for Mac to rescue data at any time.

Can You Download Netflix Movies On A Macbook

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Netflix Free Movies On Computer

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Cadillac Ignition Repair & Key Replacement Anaheim CA

Cadillac Ignition Repair & Key Replacement Anaheim CA - CALL (626)800-4410

http://www.anaheimkeyreplacement.com/cadillac.html

Did you lost your Cadillac key, broke your fobic key and need a supplemental key or locked your keys in the trunk? Anaheim Key Replacement Cadillac key-smith personals is working 24 seven as the town masters in car key cutting, duplication and programming mechanisms. With a basic call to our main office, we'll dispatch our adept lost or broken Cadillac keys experts to come down explicitly to your venue to program, duplicate or cut transponder key, keyfob, flip-key or keyless device for every kind of vehicle pickup, motor cycle, truck or SUV you own.

Cadillac keys replacement in Anaheim CA

One of the most essential part of any Cadillac is it's key lock instrumentation, which will must be re keyed if harmed or lost. When this style of a pain transpires we, at Anaheim Key Replacement, in Anaheim CA, are in fact trained to undertake all types of key, ignition or lock difficulties on premises.

Cadillac transponder key is uniquely compiled to start an explicit car and our know how workforce can create Cadillac flipkey, laser cut, anti theft system or transponder keys, and moreover repair, install or replace any kind of ignition, keys and locks on site 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

About Cadillac key and lock platform

Cadillac is an American manufacturer of cars established in 1902, essentially exists as a subject of General Motors with product spectrum accommodating opulence cars.  Cadillac started employing transponder keys in 1997 on some designs. A transponder key can encompass a remote clicker, to lock or unlock the door locks and possibly even turn on the car, however a plain mechanical key with a chip will be sufficient to manually perform equivalent operations.

In 2007,  Cadillac started the use of Adaptive Remote Start & Keyless Access keyless entry on some designs.

Ignition switch repair

The Cadillac ignition switch use three positions that start up specific instrumentation as the key is turned. The ignition lock will start up the electric units on the first stage, start up the fuel injection on the second stage and turn on the engine on the 3rd stage.

One of the most frequent question we get asked in our call center is to assist with, is diagnosing ignition lock problems. While we are generally happy to try and diagnose your situation, it can be incredibly hard to accomplish over the phone. On top of having dedicated Cadillac diagnostic and lock bumping tools, an elemental understanding of how vehicle ignition lock run is mandatory, still prior to calling an ignnition expert please check the options below:

</p> <h5>dash-board console light are off</h5> <p> If you turn the ignition switch on and lights doesn't turn over at the instrument panel which means that no current running from the car battery. It could be a dead battery or maybe even a bad alternator or electronic wiring connection could cause this. Turn on the front lights, if they wont work, it's actually means the battery has no power which is a task for a  electrician.

</p> <h5>Key will not turn in ignition</h5> <p> Exceedingly all car compose of a steering wheel locking mechanism that lock itself when ever you remove the ignition key out of the switch  at the end of each drive. Frequently, the steering column can lock in a position that employs weight to the ignition lock, and prevents the key from turning (usually when you park on a hill) or if a front wheel is pushed against an obstacle (like curb stone).

* Before you begin fixing this issue, make sure that your motor vehicle has the parking brake applied.

Grab the  wheel and try to move the sized steering wheel  right and left and left and right during lightly shake left and right the ignition holding the key - this may help in releasing the steering column.

The ignition is one of the most critical component of any vehicle and consisting of manifold small components that can be wearisome to diagnose by a non-experience hands, so the most an owner may do confronting ignition switch or key malfunctions is to verify you are in fact attempting to start up your very own car and call a car keysmith to come down to your place of choice to repair, replace  reprogram the ignition or key which will priced as approximately $150–$325.

Transponder key cut and program

Two decades ago car manufacturers didn't use electronic in their key and lock technology. Car lockpick and stealing was trivial and was a sizeable distress to drivers and insurance companies world wide.

The main idea behind this is to attain antitheft system where the car enclose car's computer and the key enclose a small chip customarily hidden inside it's plastic bill.

Whenever the user enter the key into the ignition key-tunnel, digital message is transmitted to the engine control module. If the car computer system doesn't identify the message, the vehicle engine would not light up. This infrastructure implies that cutting the key to fit the ignition switch will not be enough if you want to start up the vehicle, as the key accommodate a transponder that ought to be programmatically sync to the car computer system.

Cadillac smart-key

Cadillac keyless entry let a driver to lock and unlock the car doors in addition to bursting the car yet avoiding using a metal key, and since 2007, a lot of Cadillac vehicles on the road are equipped with some sort of a keyless device instrument that consist of a short-range transmitter.

With a smart key, opening the door to your Cadillac is usually acquired by sending a radio-frequency signal from a transponder in the keyless device to a vehicle ECM on a coded data stream when the driver solely swinging by within 5 ft of the vehicle with the proximity key in the pocket or on a key ring.

This radio frequency signal and the Cadillac smartkey structure, furthermore enable push 2 start ignition (also called Bump starting or Crash starting). Using this system a user is capable of firing up a car engine by clicking a push buttons on the dashboard rather then turning a key in a key-pocket.

Copy vs lost car keys

The good old days of replacing a car key by purchasing a low cost metal blade blankey and cut at a hardware or a walmart store  are ancient history. Exceedingly all contemporary cars supplied either with immobiliser and transponder keys besides push to start ignition and smartkeys.

The keys compose of an assembled chip which interfaces with the vehicle computer in the vehicle. If the vehicle ECM doesn't identify the key, the car will not start.

This contemporary electric key lock instrumentation combine additional security and convenience and turn out to be exceedingly effective antitheft technology, nevertheless replacing them if they get stolen or lost should be done by a mobile locksmith or the dealer-ship with a distinct Cadillac key programmer and diagnostic appliances and generally is way more expensive.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

DESIGN AND AMBITION

They have millions of users. It's hard to distinguish spending too much from raising too little. But even investors who don't. These are not early numbers. Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. Making things cheaper is actually a good sign when you know that you're wasting your time. Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted. You have to produce something.1 You're rolling the dice again, whether you like it or not.

A round from Sequoia. The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be enough to start a company with a lot of that there. Yes, he may have extensive business experience. They'll go where life is good. When a technology is this young, the existing solutions are good enough.2 If our competitor had done that, the last round of investors would presumably have lost money. What nerds like is the kind of people who could have made it, if they'd had them. Lots forgot USB sticks. The fact that investors are so much influenced by recipes for wisdom. It was a classic metacircular interpreter written on top of Common Lisp, with a definite family resemblance to the eval function defined in McCarthy's original Lisp paper. Don't use it with investors either. It was a place people went in search of something new.

One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.3 And the fact that they don't have to pay as much for that. Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly.4 When they think it's hard to come up with things on their own, you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea for something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as they will ignore advantages to be got from specific representations of data. The real problem is the way they're paid. But that isn't true. When one company or industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side. It explains why VCs take so agonizingly long to make up new things, most of the techniques I've described are conservative: they're aimed at preserving the character of the site, but also that it makes life locally more efficient, but also cause you to focus on the business model from the beginning when there's a path out of an idea like that, remember: ideas like that are all around you.5 Users have worried about that since the site was a few months in. The question of whether you're too late is subsumed by the question of whether you're too late is subsumed by the question of how to make money. There's no single solution to that.

It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. If things go well, this shouldn't matter.6 But remember that we already have almost fifty years of history behind us.7 This strategy will work best with the best investors, who are so often unwise that in popular culture this now seems to be through working on hard problems. That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about entrepreneurship. So better a good idea, because something changed, and no one else has noticed yet. I suspect people in Hollywood are simply mystified by hackers' attitudes toward copyrights. For example, the question of the relative merits of programming languages often degenerates into a religious war, because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers. The time required to raise money grows with the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny.

This attitude is sometimes affected. And while young founders are at a disadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really understand their peers. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those.8 A startup with its sights set on bigger things can often capture a small market that will either turn into a big one. Don't give up. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff.9 But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster.

They gave it a name that was a joking reference to Multics: Unix. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. When a startup launches, there have to be a successful language? Larry and Sergey did then. Just build things. The fake version is not merely toward languages being developed as open-source x? Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for a lot of the towns they like most in the US? You couldn't get from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything. For example, once computers get so cheap that most people think don't matter. The power of this technique extends beyond startups and programming languages and essays.

Drew Houston did work on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. They're each only a great university short of becoming a silicon valley even here?10 One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make something useful. But the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones. Forty-two years later, Kleiner Perkins funded Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. The best investors aren't influenced much by the opinion of other investors. It's obvious why: problems are irritating. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good.

Notes

There are simply no outside forces pushing high school as a process rather than risk their community's disapproval. They're so selective that they don't yet have any of his peers.

In practice sufficiently expert doesn't require one to be like a winner, they may then, depending on how much of a company just to load a problem, but I have yet to find it more natural to the next investor. The second biggest regret was caring so much control, and stir. VCs should be.

If anyone remembers such an idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a complicated but pointless collection of qualities helps people make investment decisions well when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? That name got assigned to it because the remedy was to reboot them, not because it's a proxy for revenue growth. I read comments on e.

Peter Thiel would point out, First Round excluded their most successful startups have exits at all. What you're too early for a monitor. What you're looking for something new if the founders want the first version was mostly Lisp, though more polite, was one cause of the subject today is still hard to get great people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by bookmarking, not just something the automobile, the 2005 summer founders, because there are no startups to be in the top and get nothing. In fact the decade preceding the war, federal tax receipts as a technology startup takes some amount of material wealth, the partners discriminate against deals that come to them?

This is isomorphic to the prevalence of systems of seniority. But it's telling that it was true that the web have sucked—and probably harming the state of technology. Sheep act the way they do. There are still a few fresh vegetables to a degree in design is any better than his peers, couldn't afford it.

If you actually started acting like adults, it is genuine. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 1912. And that is exactly the point of view anyway.

It's more in the trade press. And the expertise and connections the founders: agree with them.

A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's not directly, but historical abuses are easier for some reason insists that you wouldn't mind missing, false positives caused by blacklists, I put it here. Yes, strictly speaking, you're putting something in this department. The Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2006.

I wouldn't bet on it, there is at fault, since that was really only useful for one video stream.

While Jessica didn't ask many questions, they sometimes describe it as if you'd just thought of them had been raised religious and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any given person might have. Where Do College English 28 1966-67, pp.

[djatoon]

A question of tolerance

Our public figures must rediscover the true spirit of liberty

DOUGLAS MURRAY

It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the death of liberalism. But as crowds high on the octane of generational self-righteousness rampage through major cities, the evidence mounts. The growing intolerance of freedom of thought, the inability to talk across divides, the way that most of the British establishment, police included, feels the need to pledge fealty to the cause — as though all terrified of ending up on the wrong side — points to a crisis of more than confidence. It is evidence of an underlying morbidity.

Each day the cultural revolution is picking up a pace, with the iconoclasts who attacked the Cenotaph and the statue of Winston Churchill looking for new focuses for their rage. The University of Liverpool has announced that its Gladstone halls of residence will be renamed after protestors pointed out that the former prime minister’s father had owned slaves. So there goes the ‘sins of the father’ ethic too. Nervous broadcasters have started removing programmes ahead of any stampede, with the BBC withdrawing Little Britain and HBO taking out Gone with the Wind from their streaming services in case the woke eye of Sauron flashes on them.

What we are seeing is nothing more or less than the death of the liberal ideal.

Of course ‘liberalism’ was always a broadly defined term; a definition made only vaguer by Americans making it synonymous with ‘left-wing’. But in the truest political sense it encapsulates most of the foundations of our political order, including (though not limited to) equality, the rule of law and freedom — including the freedom of speech that allows good ideas to win out. In the past few years, left-wing critics have been keen to identify what they see as the erasure of liberal democracy by popularly elected leaders on the political right. But in our own country, the much more serious assault on political liberalism comes not from the conservative right, but from the radical left.

Over the past couple of weeks, well–meaning people have poured almost a million pounds into the coffers of Black Lives Matter UK in the belief that they are helping a movement that will help black people. In fact they have funded a deeply radical movement. On its own fundraising page, BLM UK describes its aims as: ‘to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures.’ So as well as dismantling a nonexistent menace (‘imperialism’) it intends to bring down the economy and completely alter relations between the sexes (negatively characterised as ‘patriarchy’). This is not liberalism, but far-left radicalism of a kind that has become very familiar of late.

Some people watching events of recent days will have been surprised by how far and fast such sentiments have run. By the sight of a mob in Bristol tearing down a statue and then jumping on it. By a Labour MP saying: ‘I celebrate these acts of resistance. We need a movement that will tear down systemic racism.’ By the ranks of British police who could find no way to respond to this behaviour other than (in a newly invented act of faith) to ‘take the knee’ before it. And then there is the media, which has chosen to provide cover for such violence and purge from their ranks not just people who dissent from it but, in the case of the New York Times a few days ago, anyone who helps publish someone who dissents.

As one of the last liberals left at that newspaper, Bari Weiss, explained it last week, the over-forties in the news business (like so many others) imagined that the people coming up under them shared their liberal worldview. Then they discovered that these young people believed in ‘safetyism’ over liberalism, and ‘the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe’ over ‘what were considered core liberal values, like free speech’. Actually the divide is even bigger than that, and now encompasses nearly everything. Where the liberal mind is inquiring, the woke mind is dogmatic. Where the liberal mind is capable of humility, the woke mind is capable of none. Where the liberal mind is able to forgive, the woke mind believes that to have erred just once is cause enough to be ‘cancelled’. And while the liberal mind inherited the idea of loving your neighbour, the woke mind positively itches to cast the first stone.

Readers of The Spectator have known this was coming. When this magazine first wrote about the Stepford Students, it was asked why we take this so seriously — surely the students would grow up? And they did: but they didn’t change. The virtue–signalling of large corporations — the growing legions of diversity officers and ‘implicit bias training’ — was also written off as the silliness of the corporate world. When we described the mandatory requirement in government to prove a ‘commitment to diversity’ in order to be eligible for any public appointment, it was greeted with the same dismissal. As the American journalist Andrew Sullivan (himself now seemingly muzzled, if not cancelled) put it two years ago: ‘We all live on campus now.’

Step by step, the UK came to have a public and private sector dedicated to the implementation of views which are barely distinguishable from those of the protestors who took to the streets in the past week or two. It’s an ethic which demands that our society play a set of impossible, unwinnable games of identity and ‘privilege’ that not only subvert but end any idea of tolerance.

All of this emanates from those who come out of university educated to loathe our society, believing it to be characterised by the oppression of certain groups by other groups: a shameful history and a shameful present. Today these people head into professions where their language of aggressive superiority (‘Educate yourself’) is used to intimidate their elders, force every-one to agree with their point of view and otherwise make themselves unsackable.

As with all movements that catch, they aren’t on to nothing. Inequalities and inequities do exist, here as in all societies. Reasonable people disagree about how to address this. But the new illiberal radicals do not share that worry. For them, every inequity that exists (financial, familial, social, neurological) is the result of the same thing: discrimination. A thing we must ‘tackle’, ‘eradicate’ and otherwise cleanse from existence. There’s an awful lot of work to do.

Even the woke analysis of history that now sees them scouring the land for more statues to assault is radically different from that of the liberal mind. Liberals understand that people in history acted with the knowledge they had at the time, and that the task of those looking back is to look on it with understanding, not least in the hope of being understood in turn. The woke mind abhors this. It knows that it is right, and that everybody before this year zero was a bigot. After the weekend’s vandalism against London monuments, the capital’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, announced that his ‘Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm’ would sit in judgment on all racist statues in the capital. Within hours, the Museum of London had already brought in the cranes to remove an errant statue on West India Quay.

In such ways has the free exchange of ideas about our past and present been replaced by a series of demands and assertions that demand everyone else’s compliance. ‘Silence is violence’ is one favoured line, meaning that if you do not agree with the radicals, you are perpetrating an act of violence. Naturally this assertion comes from the same people who have spent a lot of time asserting that words (such as ‘mis-gendering’ someone) are violence. While the violence of the past few days is not violence.

It is on the lip of this trap that our representatives and public figures have teetered over the past week or two, unable to work out how they can avoid a step they intuit to be deadly. What they need to do is pause and fundamentally change the terms, basing their appeal not just on reason but on a truly liberal spirit. It should be one which emphasises that the claims being made are unjust. It is unjust to portray the whole of American society, in all of its complexity, as typified by a policeman who is awaiting trial for murder. And it is even more unjust to think that his actions reveal some deep truth about the British police, or the British state, let alone everybody who is white. Equally, it is not just unjust but vindictive to pretend that any contradiction of your world view is merely a display of ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’ or ‘white tears’.

Unwittingly or otherwise, those who use these terms subvert one of the last great additions to liberal thought: that aspiration expressed by Dr Martin Luther King half a century ago. For when Dr King talked about the need to judge a person by the content of their character and not by the colour of their skin, he gave us something that was not just a great moral insight but — in an increasingly diverse society — the only solution. A year before his death, Dr King gave a speech titled ‘Where do we go from here?’ in which he said: ‘Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!”, when nobody will shout, “Black Power!”, but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.’

The people who have come after Dr King have spent years busily inverting that dream. In the name of black agency they try to deny white people agency. In the name of assailing white supremacy they end up by asserting black supremacy. And in order to make up for the sufferings of people who are no longer alive they demand vast wealth transfers today based on racial grouping. It is hard to imagine a more divisive programme, all carried out in the name of anti–racism. What they are actually doing is busily re-racialising our societies. Which is how you come to the situation where a cabinet minister is quizzed on Sky News about the precise ethno-racial composition of the British cabinet and certain ‘anti-racists’ can be found on social media noting with disapproval the number of people of Asian descent in the cabinet.

Any movement that says ‘Things are so bad that this whole thing needs to be pulled down’ should be encouraged to realise, before they have to experience it, the cost of what they are abandoning. And to remember the central truth about how much easier it is to pull down than it is to build. They must be responded to by people of every skin colour and background with a polite but firm ‘No’. Not just because the things that they are attempting to pull down include the only things that are capable of holding us all up. But because if everything that got us here was so bad, then what we are living in wouldn’t be so unusually good.

spectator.co.uk/podcast - Douglas Murray and Kate Andrews on the future of liberalism.

[componentplanet]

Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism, Where One Company Buys Another and Your Stuff Stops Working

Once upon a time, there was a company named Wyze that made cheap security cameras and other various IoT products. As of today, Wyze cameras won’t detect people anymore. People detection, to be clear, is a major feature of Wyze cameras. The Wyze Cam is advertised as offering “custom zone detection and sensitivity settings,” and you automatically get a clip of what the camera captures while the full recording is saved in the cloud.

Yesterday, Apple bought the AI company Xnor.ai. In and of itself, that’s not particularly interesting, except for the impact it had on Wyze users. But firmware is now rolling out to Wyze devices that removes their ability to detect people. To be fair to Wyze, the company did warn users that the removal was happening back in November, via forum post and email, though some people will still be unpleasantly surprised.

Wyze has promised that the removal is temporary and that they will roll out a replacement this year. The company claims to have assembled its own AI engineering group, and promises that the functionality will remain free, even if it moves to cloud processing rather than using AI. It may even be possible to avoid losing the capability by refusing to update your firmware (some Wyze users speculated about this in the original comment thread). The company needs to deliver on what it’s promising, but it seems to be making the right moves.

But nothing Wyze is doing — nothing Wyze can do — changes the intrinsic absurdity of the situation. Users who purchased a camera for the purpose of person detection will no longer have access to this capability because Apple bought an AI company. It will be gone for the indefinite future. If you update your firmware (voluntarily or no), you may lose the very reason you bought the product in the first place.

An Extremely Abbreviated History of Property

The idea that all people have intrinsic property rights is pretty new compared with the scope of human history. You can date the beginnings of the idea to the Renaissance, but the debate really kicks off in 17th century England. No less a figure than Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that ordinary men had no right to withhold property from their sovereign and that a ruler could seize the belongings of anyone he ruled over without consent. Property ownership in ancient societies was often restricted to particular classes or groups. Jews, for example, were often forbidden from owning property, as were African-Americans prior to the Civil War. Women were still considered the legal property of their husbands in both England and the United States until the mid-to-late 19th century.

My still-living grandmother has told me about how she was unable to get a credit card without a male co-signer before the 1970s. Clearly, we’re still ironing out the bugs, even as both the concept of ownership and the idea that products and services should prioritize human beings over corporations have both come under attack.

The “concept of ownership” argument is one you’ve probably heard a thousand times before. In brief: The rise of digital products and services, combined with an always-available internet has made it much easier for companies to create subscription models that deliver access to content on-demand but never actually allow you to own anything. It’s a complex topic that touches on everything from consumer freedom of choice to whether subscription models provide better economic value than purchasing physical products, which itself depends on how the product is used. It’s a discussion worth having, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about.

Modern IP Agreements, Contracts Aren’t Written for Humans

The disagreements between cable companies and content providers are a perfect example of how good customer outcomes are increasingly ignored. When the two sides fight, customers lose access to the shows in question, but are still generally expected to pay full price for a product they literally aren’t receiving. Last year, DirecTV and Comcast were both caught charging customers a Regional Sports Network fee despite not carrying content from a major RSN, Altitude Sports. Both companies had dropped Altitude two months earlier. Comcast had at least been offering refunds. DirecTV just kept on charging people. Can you break your contract with your cable company when you discover you’ve been charged for a product that was not provided? Generally speaking, no. ISPs, however, are allowed to charge you for an entire month’s service, even if you cancel halfway through the month. In other contexts, charging someone for services you then knowingly don’t provide is called fraud.

The smart home market is another area where this issue runs rampant. A number of companies have launched with hardware that’s fully capable of interoperation with other systems, only to deliberately junk their own equipment as part of going out of business. Planned obsolescence is itself obsolete, replaced by programmed obsolescence. Spectrum is the latest company to win this badge of honor for refusing to allow its Zigbee security cameras to communicate with Zigbee devices made by other companies. If anything keeps the smart home concept from taking off, it’ll be the way the industry is repeatedly burning its own early adopters.

One of the hallmarks of programmed obsolescence is that when it happens, humans often have no recourse. When Rockstar lost its license to the music in GTA IV, the company summarily yanked the affected songs right out of the game. There was no option to purchase them for your own personal use, even if you wanted to. Apparently, it wasn’t worth it to Rockstar to renegotiate the rights or the company was unable to do so. Neither explanation does anything for the people who bought the game and want the soundtrack it shipped with.

Imagine, for a moment, if this standard applied to movies. What if Hollywood studios or streaming services were required to pay royalties for every song in a movie for a given period? What would happen when those agreements inevitably expired? If that sounds crazy, I’d like to remind you that Hollywood literally patched an in-theater movie for the first time in history last December. Anybody want to hear the replacement tracks for Star Wars when the license with John Williams expires because Disney and his estate can’t come to an agreement circa 2050?

Similarly, did any human on Earth choose to continue doing business with Equifax after their 2017 data breach? Were we allowed to have a voice in whether this company was allowed to continue to exist? That’s not an unreasonable request given that we’re forced to do business with it.

What’s striking about many of these outcomes is how there’s no one to actually blame. Apple bought Xnor.ai, so Apple is well within its rights to terminate previous license agreements. Wyze can’t expect to continue to benefit from technology it hasn’t licensed. And finally: End users shouldn’t expect to retain permanent access to a technology Wyze provides, even if Wyze didn’t explicitly communicate to said users that they were only renting a feature they thought they were purchasing. If you accept the precepts, the conclusion is inevitable: Regular users get screwed to one degree or another and nobody cares.

We didn’t used to accept these precepts. Again, I’m not trying to bash Wyze here — the company is reacting to the facts as they exist on the ground today, and I’ll be the first to acknowledge that this specific situation is relatively small potatoes. The problem is, it’s not just one event or company. It’s everywhere.

If Intel or AMD were founded today, they’d be named Chiply. You’d sign up for a service that shipped you a CPU of your choice with a corresponding monthly fee and a hardwired 30-day validation requirement. Need to save money? No problem! Just agree to run a performance analyzer and to share your personal web traffic 24/7 so Chiply can gather useful data to improve future products. You can’t see what data the profiler collects and you aren’t allowed to know what Chiply does with it, and you’re certainly not going to get any information about which “trusted partners” Chiply sells it to shares it with, and you wouldn’t ever be told that those trusted partners are under no obligation to protect your data, and Chiply would never voluntarily admit that it actually ran the profiling application on everyone’s computer, whether you paid a monthly fee or not.

But hey. Free CPU.

Now Read:

Security Camera Maker Wyze Admits to 23-Day Data Breach

Ransomware Groups Now Threatening to Release Stolen Data If Businesses Don’t Pay

Hackers Openly Peddle Tools to Hack Ring Cameras

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/304897-late-stage-capitalism-one-company-buys-another-and-your-stuff-stops-working from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/01/welcome-to-late-stage-capitalism-where.html

[richmeganews]

Why tech companies failed to keep the New Zealand shooter’s extremism from going viral

Friday’s massacre exemplified the problem of expecting tech companies to self-police content.

The hate-filled terror rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was meticulously designed to maximize the number of witnesses around the globe, highlighting the difficulty in putting a lid on extremist hate that spreads online.

The suspected gunman did everything he could to make his shooting spree go viral. He live-streamed the attack on social media, wearing a body camera to simulate a video game. He shared a rambling 74-page manifesto espousing white supremacy that was full of memes and easter eggs meant to invite attention from all corners of the internet and admiration from other extremists who live extremely online. The shooter had laid a trap across the internet that exploited the newsworthiness of the attack and leaned into peoples’ inclination to gawk at horror and violence. Even professional journalistic institutions gave in to the temptation to air video of the massacre.

Scrubbing the video from the internet was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Facebook quickly removed the alleged gunman’s Facebook and Instagram accounts — but not because its algorithm or moderators had flagged the violent content in real-time. New Zealand authorities had to ask for the video to be taken down. Internet service providers in New Zealand rushed to “close off” websites that were distributing the video, but then a number of copy cat sites immediately started popping up.

It soon didn’t matter that the original video was removed. The clip had already been downloaded and re-upped online faster than tech companies could respond. Facebook alone says it removed 1.5 million videos within the first 24 hours of the attack. And those are just the clips they were able to catch.

Friday’s massacre exemplified a larger problem that’s plaguing the internet. Platforms are struggling to self-police problematic content created by its users, while the lawmakers who would ostensibly impose regulations are either too reluctant or ill-equipped to do so — and many in both camps are predisposed to treat far-right rhetoric less seriously than other forms of extremism, to boot.

As the death toll rises — now 50 lives have been taken since Friday’s shooting, making it one of the deadliest terror attacks carried out by a far-right extremist in recent memory — the attack adds extra weight to the question that tech companies, policymakers, and social media users have been asking: How do you effectively police online hate?

The shooter’s viral video outpaced social media company’s content moderation

The world’s largest tech companies were forced to scramble on Friday to keep the violent screed from spreading. Facebook said it was removing any praise or support of the shooting, and had a process to flag the digital fingerprint of disturbing materials. YouTube said it was “working vigilantly” to remove violent footage, while Twitter said it suspended the account that posted the original video. Reddit on Friday eventually resorted to taking down two infamous subreddits, r/watchpeopledie and r/gory.

Despite those efforts, videos of the attack were easy to find through simple searches online, even hours and days after the initial shooting spree. The swift dissemination highlights how ill-equipped tech companies remain in addressing the vile, racist, and excessively violent content that’s being shared on their platforms.

Took me about 30 seconds to find YouTube videos of the ripped livestream: pic.twitter.com/TFkQHIqQbf

— Jason Abbruzzese (@JasonAbbruzzese) March 15, 2019

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Moderators already face an uphill battle in keeping offensive and violent content offline; the Christchurch terror attack shows the difficulty of catching deeply-problematic video live-streams in real-time.

For one, it’s generally easier for software to scan text and offensive comments as opposed to moving images in a video. But even when the technical tools exist, policing-breaking news poses unique problems. YouTube, for example, does have a system for automatically removing copyrighted content or prohibited materials, and told the Verge’s Julia Alexander that any exact re-uploads of alleged shooter’s videos would be automatically deleted. But the algorithm can’t be used to tamp down on edited versions of the Christchurch massacre, because Youtube wants to “ensure that news videos that use a portion of the video for their segments aren’t removed in the process”:

YouTube’s safety team thinks of it as a balancing act, according to sources familiar with their thinking. For major news events like yesterday’s shooting, YouTube’s team uses a system that’s similar to its copyright tool, Content ID, but not exactly the same. It searches re-uploaded versions of the original video for similar metadata and imagery. If it’s an unedited re-upload, it’s removed. If it’s edited, the tool flags it to a team of human moderators, both full-time employees at YouTube and contractors, who determine if the video violates the company’s policies.

That process is not just traumatizing for the individual moderators who are forced to watch the horrific footage, it’s also an imperfect system to limit its reach — particularly in a fast-moving event like Friday’s tragedy.

Tech companies are expected to self-police. So far, they’re falling short.

At this point, in theory, tech companies should be well-practiced in the art of blocking far-right hate speech and violence from their platforms. They’ve been having to deal with it for years.

After the 2017 Unite the Right rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia — where a woman was mowed down and killed by an avowed Nazi sympathizer — tech companies faced intense public pressure to block prominent instigators of explicit far-right extremism. Twitter suspended a bunch of white supremacists and prominent provocateurs — including Milo Yiannoppolis, Alex Jones, and Gavin McInnes — but was hesitant to target other alt-right leaders like Richard Spencer. Gab and the Daily Stormer, two havens for neo-Nazis, were similarly banished to the darker recesses of the Internet. Reddit quarantined hate-fueled subreddits, while other companies like PayPal, GoDaddy, Squarespace blocked white supremacists from using their services.

In effect, individual leaders and groups were targeted in response to a high-profile flashpoint in American politics and culture. But for many critics, those actions were hollow in addressing the underlying proliferation of racist and white supremacist ideas that are peddled online.

And even minimal efforts at reform have come with costs for the social media giants — big ones. As Vox’s Emily Stewart noted after Facebook’s stock saw the biggest one-day drop in history last fall (with $119 billion wiped off of its value after the company reported slower-than-expected revenue growth), social media companies’ efforts to address issues with their platforms garner “enormous backlash from Wall Street.”

The message from investors is clear: They’re nervous about what bad headlines and subsequent changes from social media platforms could do to their bottom lines. If Twitter and Facebook police their sites in a way that affects engagement or cracks down on content, or if privacy controls that ask users to opt in to their data being shared lead to more of them opting out, ad dollars could fall. And hiring workers to increase privacy protections and monitor activity is expensive.

... This week offers a lesson we don’t necessarily want executives to take away: try to be better, and potentially be severely punished by investors.

Many companies only start to take action on long-standing issues when the financial risks of not doing anything become higher than the likely costs they’ll encounter.

YouTube, for example, is under fire for failing to adequately combat conspiracies and prevent child exploitation from being circulated. Its algorithm has a troubling record of surfacing and recommending content that violates its own policies. Major advertisers —including Disney and Nestle — started to bolt earlier this year after finding that their ads were appearing in videos full of offensive and sexually explicit comments aimed at children. In response, YouTube purged hundreds of its users and said it would change the way new videos are elevated and surfaced, following up on a crackdown in 2017 from reports that videos full of predatory comments were being recommended to kids.

Some lawmakers are growing impatient with tech companies’ self-regulation — but it’s not clear they can do it any better

Even as platforms have tried to regulate themselves in recent years, some policymakers’ patience for letting them do so is growing short. But the legislative solutions some of them have proposed — or lack thereof — also struggle to match the pace of change in internet culture and the communities that foster extremist ideas and behaviors.

Congress so far has struggled to grapple with — or even understand — the many tentacles of problems plaguing social networks, from tackling the spread of misinformation to regulating how sites handle user data and privacy.

Some members of Congress have been woefully ill-prepared to even talk about tech issues (during one hearing last year, a lawmaker asked the Google CEO questions about his iPhone). And even when they are interested and equipped to talk about regulating the internet, many US lawmakers have been “reticent to clamp down at the risk of harming growth,” Stewart noted:

In a Senate hearing in April, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) asked Zuckerberg what “sorts of legislative changes” he thought should be enacted to prevent a Cambridge Analytica repeat. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who also pressed Zuckerberg on whether Facebook is a monopoly, asked the executive to submit some proposed regulations to him.

Still, interest is growing. In the 2020 presidential primary race, Democratic candidates have vowed to take on Big Tech — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has gone as far as proposing to break up Google, Facebook, and Amazon, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar is expected to make tech reform a banner issue for her campaign.

There’s a growing appetite for reform elsewhere in the world. The European Union took a stand on privacy concerns with General Data Protection Regulation Act, or GDPR, a law enacted last year to compel transparency around the data that companies collect and how it is used. And now some countries want crack down on extremist content, too.

A British Parliamentary committee wants Facebook to be held legally liable for the content posted on the platform. The legislative body recently wrapped up an 18-month investigation into the social media site, finding that it violated data privacy and competition laws. And in the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks, British officials are threatening that tech companies be “prepared to face the force of the law” if they don’t put a lid on the spread of hateful messages.

You really need to do more @YouTube @Google @facebook @Twitter to stop violent extremism being promoted on your platforms. Take some ownership. Enough is enough https://t.co/GTSgRufOow

— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) March 15, 2019

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The response to Islamic extremism online is often treated much differently than white supremacy

It’s well documented that social media has played an important role in helping fuel extremism and hate. Just look to the spread of ISIS, which notoriously leveraged and exploited platforms to recruit new members and promote propaganda. But more often than not, US authorities focus on Islamic extremism, even as homegrown right-wing terror has begun to have its moment.

That holds true for the tech companies as well. Even as they worked up solutions to combat ISIS online, they’ve been flat-footed in their response to white nationalism and white supremacy. Last year Motherboard found that while YouTube was cracking down on videos of ISIS recruits, footage promoting neo-Nazi propaganda stayed online for months and even years.

And when researchers from Program on Extremism at George Washington University compared far-right extremism with ISIS online behavior, they found that the growth in white nationalist movements outpaced Islamic extremism by virtually every metric.

The white nationalist datasets examined outperformed ISIS in most current metrics and many historical metrics. White nationalists and Nazis had substantially higher follower counts than ISIS supporters, and tweeted more often. ISIS supporters had better discipline regarding consistent use of the movement’s hashtags, but trailed in virtually every other respect. The clear advantage enjoyed by white nationalists was attributable in part to the effects of aggressive suspensions of accounts associated with ISIS networks.

Part of that could be the difficulty companies face in identifying offensive far-right content. As seen with the Christchurch manifesto, far-right extremism has a unique life online with its own language that’s embedded in memes and “shitposts” and difficult to decipher. As Vox’s Aja Romano outlines in an fantastic rundown of the manifesto’s underlying message, the alt-right has mastered the art of online trolling to “distort what their actual message is, so they can claim plausible deniability that their message is harmful or bad.”

But leaving it unchecked has consequences: The surge in online activity coincides with a rise in real-world hate, particularly in the US. One study found that the number of far-right terror attacks in America more than quadrupled over the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency.

In the last year alone, there have been a number of high-profile flare-ups of far-right violence. A US Coast Guard and self-proclaimed white nationalist had stockpiled weapons and ammunition with plans to stage an attack targeting Democratic politicians, journalists and judges. Last fall’s Pittsburgh shooting targeting Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue left 11 dead. In October, a man sent 13 pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and critics of Trump.

None of those incidents prompted major reform efforts on tech companies’ parts. But in light of the graphic massacre in New Zealand, there’s a chance the conversation around right-wing extremism may change. The staggering violence of ISIS’s campaign helped define it as a terror-driven organization and made tech companies and governments alike get serious about combatting its propaganda online. Are they prepared to do the same with white supremacy?

The Christchurch shooter livestreamed his attack. The video was disseminated across the internet even as platforms desperately worked to remove it.

— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) March 16, 2019

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It will be interesting to see if platforms implement a similar "zero-tolerance, you post this video or a still image from it and you're permabanned" policy with the Christchurch attack video.

— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) March 16, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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The 22 Key Elements of a High Quality Website

Have you ever wondered what makes a great website? You know things like content, videos, and images are all important, but there has to be more to it, right?

There is! For example, 79% of people scan web pages, so if you don’t know how to make your page optimally scannable, it won’t do well.

Another key factor of a quality website is credibility. Without a credible website, you’ll struggle to get more customers and increase conversions. Plus, credibility shows you’re trustworthy. If you’re offering something without a trusted name or brand behind it, people will be hesitant to buy what you’re selling.

Why? Well, with so many other options available on the market, it’s too easy for people to find what they’re looking for somewhere else.

This goes for ecommerce stores, blogs, or any business that has a website. If a visitor sees a red flag on your website, they will leave. It’s that simple.

Some of you may not even realize you have components on your site that drive people away. Even if you don’t necessarily have elements driving people away, you can always add more components to improve your credibility. And that’s just the tip of it… there are a ton of small things you need to do in order to create a high quality website.

Here are the top 22 key elements of a high quality website that you should be sure to consider:

1. Relevance and context

Developing well written and informative content for the user is one of the biggest key factors in creating a high quality website.

Quality content is original, purposeful, and correctly optimized information that people and search engines are driven to read, view, and share.

According to SearchMetrics, Google’s algorithm recognizes high quality, relevant content, and rewards it with higher rankings.

Focus on creating only the best high quality content that you can. It will help you rank better and delight your customers.

2. Content length

Focus on developing longer content. The ideal blog post length from and SEO perspective is between 2,000 and 2,450+ words long.

However, the ideal blog post length from a readers perspective is only 1,600 words long.

Sites with more words in the copy occupy higher ranking positions but it is important to find a balance between SEO and user readability.

The perfect blend will vary depending on your niche, competition, and audience.

3. Grammar and spelling

Ask yourself this question:  Why would a search engine show a page of content with grammar and spelling errors higher in the rankings when other pages of error free content exist?

The answer: They won’t!

Grammar and spelling mistakes make you look bad in the eyes of your customer, and the search engines may even penalize you for it. Always read your copy at least 2 times before you publish it or hire an editor to proofread and edit your post if you need help.

Flawless copy makes your website look professional and will earn you better rankings.

4. Readability

Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood.

Use shorter sentences, paragraphs, and active web forms. Remove all clutter, unnecessary words and limit the use of adverbs and adjectives.

Use the Flesch reading ease formula to determine the readability of your text before publishing.

5. Formatting

79% of users always scan web pages, according to a Nielsen study.

Not only that but visitors are less likely to read a post with poor formatting. High quality content is easier to read, and suitable for scanning and skimming.

Use H1, H2, H3, etc. tags, number lists, and bullet points to break down your content.

Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Use bold and italics to highlight important parts so that they are highly visible as people scan.

6. Images and video

Include images or videos in every piece of content that you publish.

Web pages with images and videos are more engaging for visitors and rank better in Google too (according to SearchMetrics).

Keep in mind that web pages in top rankings have an average of 7 images on their page so be sure to use at least a few.

7. Expertise

High quality pages and websites need enough expertise to be authoritative and trustworthy on their topic.

The expertise of the author is a critical factor for any content to be considered high quality.

People want to read posts from experts that can dig into a topic and explain it. Focus on writing detailed, well-researched posts and give examples to support your points.

8. Social media shares

High quality websites have social media buttons present on their pages.

Place your social media sharing icons visibly on the page and include call-to-action for people to share.

9. Internal and external links

Linking to valuable internal and external resources not only delights your readers but will also help you rank better.

9 out of 10 sites at position 1 in SERPS have at least one internal self-referencing link.

Focus on building a nice internal link architecture. The URL that you link to and the anchor text need to be relevant to your content.

Never link to unrelated pages or you may be penalized by Google and it leads to poor user experience overall.

10. Quality of comments

Content with a high number of comments is perceived as high quality.

On the other hand, spammy unrelated comments might hurt your rankings and make you look bad in the eyes of your visitors.

Make sure you moderate your comments and leave thoughtful responses to engage your users to do the same.

Quality comments help you rank better and engages your readers with the content.

11. Limit advertisements

While advertisements may be a nice form of income for you, they aren’t popular with your visitors.

How much do you rely on ads to make a profit?

If it’s just a small percentage, I recommend getting rid of them altogether.

If you’re an ecommerce site or have a website that makes money from other revenue streams, ads aren’t always necessary.

But say you run a blog and ads are your primary income. In that case, you’ll need to keep them as limited as possible.

Take a look at the types of ads people dislike the most:

Take these numbers into consideration.

Avoid popup ads, and use minimal banner ads.

Although 43% of customers still dislike banners, it’s not as high of a number compared to some other options.

12. Customer service that’s easily accessible

If someone visiting your site has a question or problem, they shouldn’t have to hunt for customer service options.

This should be readily available.

When customer service is unreachable, it makes the visitor feel uneasy.

Especially if it’s during normal business hours.

Note how Apple Support gives customers a variety of ways to reach customer service:

They even have a recommended option.

People love to have choices.

Not everyone wants to pick up the phone.

It’s great when companies have customer service available via online chat.

If you can swing it, give it a try.

13. All your contact information

This should go without saying, but you’d be surprised how often I can’t find contact information on websites.

When I see that, I think it’s sketchy.

What are they trying to hide by withholding their phone number?

Make sure your site has:

physical address

email address

phone number

links to social pages (Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn)

Failure to do so will make your page appear untrustworthy.

14. Reviews and testimonials

Showcasing customer testimonials on your website helps generate social proof.

This is especially true if you can get a testimonial from an expert in your industry.

You should also have a place on your site where customers can leave reviews.

While good reviews are obviously what you’re looking for, some unfavorable comments may actually boost your credibility as well.

If all customer feedback on your website is positive, it may appear fake.

Even if some people didn’t have the best experience with your business, allowing them to leave a review for others to read will establish trust.

It also helps prove you’re an actual business and not a scam.

Interact with the customers who left a review on your site.

This will help build credibility as well.

15. Security badges

What kind of security measures are you taking to protect users who visit your website?

Showcase those badges on each page.

Studies show that people trust the Norton AntiVirus seal the most compared to other badges.

If you use Norton, proudly display that badge on your site.

If you’re looking for services to improve your site security, Norton may not be a bad place to start based on this information.

16. Validation from other media sources

Have you been featured in a magazine, newspaper, or on a website?

Any positive press about your company should be proudly displayed on your site.

If established media sources have verified your business, it will increase your legitimacy in the eyes of anyone who visits your website.

Find a good spot on your page to add any videos, screenshots, or links to all those stories.

17. Awards and achievements

Your website is a great place to show off any awards or achievements.

Whether it’s local, regional, or national, anything helps.

Even if you won an award a couple of years ago, put it up on your website.

Showcasing awards from the past shows you’ve been credible for a while.

It establishes your company’s history over time.

Companies that have been in business for longer periods tend to be well established and appear more credible than those that just started.

If you’ve been operating since 1950, don’t be afraid to plaster that fact on your website.

18. Ease of navigation

Customers shouldn’t struggle to find what they’re looking for on your website.

The menu options should be limited so it’s not too overwhelming.

Adding a search bar so your readers can look for something specific is a great way to improve your navigation as well.

All of this helps enhance the user experience, which helps with your credibility score.

19. Page loading speed

The faster your page loads, the higher your conversion rates will be.

It’s that simple.

Don’t try to find the cheapest web hosting service on the market. You get what you pay for.

It’s worth it to pay a little extra to avoid technical glitches and always have fast loading times.

20. Clearly state all policies

Don’t assume website visitors know your company policies.

All of these should be clearly stated on your website.

This will help you from a legal perspective as well in case there is a dispute.

Make sure things such as your return policy or money back guarantee are outlined in detail.

If you’re an ecommerce business, consumers may be hesitant to shop if they don’t think you stand behind your product.

21. Be upfront about your prices

Don’t try to sneak hidden fees past your customers.

It’s shady.

Let’s look at the top reasons for shopping cart abandonment:

Don’t wait until the last minute to tell customers you’re charging them tax, shipping, or other fees.

You should have all your prices clearly listed on the website.

Adding extra costs in the shopping cart could make the customer think you’re trying to sneak one by them.

It’s just not good business practice.

You also shouldn’t say things like “Contact us for pricing.”

Why wouldn’t you just list your prices?

What are you trying to hide?

Those are questions that will go through the customer’s mind if you do that.

22. Secure the checkout process

Refer back to that graph we just looked at regarding shopping cart abandonment.

Note 18% of those respondents said they didn’t trust the website with their credit card information.

In addition to adding security badges to your page, you have to make sure your checkout procedure is secure.

Look at this example from Dick’s Sporting Goods:

The secure link will make their customers feel comfortable about entering their personal information, including a credit card number.

Conclusion

I wish I could tell you that if you just picked a few of the key elements above, you’d have a great website. But the reality is, you won’t.

It’s a total package type of thing, and you need to work on all of the elements listed above.

Sure, implementing a few of them is better than implementing none, but the goal is to make your website so great that people would want to come back and buy from you.

If your site looks incomplete or untrustworthy, it can drastically impact your traffic and conversions.

Make sure you do your best to create a high quality website by using as many of the 22 key elements that I described above.

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-key-elements-of-a-high-quality-website/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-22-key-elements-of-high-quality.html

[robonomics]

Is Property a Right or Physical?

Last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ReDigi’s business format violated Copyright laws in Capitol Records, LLC. v. ReDigi Inc. The lawsuit was filed by music producing companies. Until hearing about this case, I never knew such a company existed, or what it did. But once I did, I began to wonder again, just like in my first week of property law class, what is property?

ReDigi’s* business model transfers digital music from one person’s hard drive to theirs for resale to another person after fully deleting the file from the original purchaser’s hard drive. According to ReDigi, their system fully got rid of the file from the original owner’s, and temporarily stored the file onto ReDigi’s "lockers” until a new person bought it from them, where ReDigi would transfer and fully delete any possession of it.** The court held that this was not actually a transfer of the property, but instead of a form of replication to make a copy from the original purchaser to the new buyer and ReDigi.

Here’s where I get confused. Property is by definition the right of ownership over something. There are several levels of property rights: ownership, title, possession, control, use, etc. So really property is a legal right of ownership of some form over something. Some call is a bundle of sticks- each stick a different attribute needed to form the bundle considered “property”. Physical objects are the easiest to understand when it comes to property rights. If it is physical, there can only be one tangible object to lay claim to. Its use, transfer, location, and existence is not up for debate because any action over it has a physical component or representation that is the actual property itself unattached to something else.

Not so much with intangible property. Ideas and information are not physical, even when they are put into physical form. Let’s get philosophical for a moment. A word is the representation of an idea. It can be shown physically on paper like in a book, or digitally like on a computer screen. But when you start to think about it further, it’s really just an idea. The digital representation of it on a screen is really just a projection of some algorithm reading a bunch of 1s and 0s in software code. In both instances, it’s still just representing the idea of the word itself. And when you continue to think about it, even the sound we make with our mouths is another physical expression of the idea that is the word, just that it comes out in a wave and can only be put into captured form when put on a recording devise. All of this is to say that a word is just an idea- something that is intangible even though there are physical ways of expressing it.

This is where the difficult part lies with determining property rights for intangibles. The right attaches primarily to the idea, and not the physical expression of that idea. The ReDigi case, however, is doing just the opposite. It transferred the right over information manifested in it’s physical form as if that’s where the intangible property right lies.

The problem with this case is that it didn’t rule on the fact that ReDigi’s software doesn’t actually completely rid buyers from the ability to make copies after they transfer the song to ReDigi. It operated under the fact scenario that ReDidgi’s product makes replications, with the assumption that previous owners possession of the product was completely extinguished in the transfer process. Let’s assume a product was made where full deletion of the original purchaser’s product was possible. The law in this case bars such a system from operating. Pretend a company comes into being similar to iTunes where they sell original copies of music under licensing agreements from music producers, but they also allow users to sell the titles back to them after they’re done and the files never leave the company’s system- a form of undownloadable/uncopyable (?) streaming or something to prevent the removal of music from the seller’s platform. To emphasize this hypothetical situation, the music cannot be copied anywhere else and just stays on the system. This case bars the user from selling the music back to the system second hand like they could if they sold a used physical book or CD. Even though they have a right of ownership over a single song based on their purchase, this case says that unless you attach it to a physical object that is for sale, you have no right to sell it again.

This is where I struggle with rights over intangibles. The law wants to give them copyright protection, but because of the ease of replication from thieves, it then prevents those who are legitimately in a situation to make a second hand sale from doing so. The more intangible a product or service, the less property rights a buyer has over what they own. Even worse, I assume the companies making intangible products create contracts that will over time further and further erode what a person can do with it. The prominence of the sharing or lending economy is growing more and more. I guarantee the original creator’s rights will get stronger.

The weird part is that courts know what to do if say the owner decides to stream the music after they buy it to let millions of other listen to it for a cheaper price than the original producer. You need a licensing agreement for that. Radio stations have been using this business model since your grandparents time. Under a licensing scenario, the property right isn’t transferring to the listener when received, just its physical representation. In this case, however, there is no licensing agreement needed, because a person isn’t just temporarily transferring the physical representation of the file (sound). Instead they are extinguishing any claim of right over it to a secondary market. The ability to make copies or stream the property ceases (theoretically) once the first purchaser sells the song to a secondary market. To be clear, the right no longer exists- i.e. property no longer exists.

All of this assumes the ability to retain the property goes away. If it doesn’t, you get into the hard problem with defining property, and why its a lot like a bundle of sticks.You might not have the right of dominion and control over a music file legally, but you may have possession of it illegally, and therefore the ability to use it. You can see why the concept of property is difficult. Even I’m getting lost as I try to logically write this babbling nonsense.

Since we’re on the subject, I’d like to say that property right protections got stronger over time as Congress deemed it important that inventors have longer dominion over their creations. I don’t necessarily agree with this, however. Why does Disney get to control Mickey Mouse for 75 years while a person who invented the cell phone get a couple decades? Why does an author get their whole life + 50 years? Why is their family so fucking special? Economists agree that property rights are essential to the proper functioning of an economy, but also universally agree that monopoly hurts it. Exclusive property rights for a temporary period of time supposedly encourages innovation, but how is innovation encouraged when you just need to make one good thing to carry you through the rest of your life? When reading history, grants of monopoly were determined to be wrong (see East India Trading Co. and other markets for goods). Why is it that the inventions or innovative ideas in certain markets get to last so long? And further, why is it that some get to control property long after they sell it while others do not? Why do some forms of property get to hold ownership over their altered posterity, like genetically modified seeds creating new plants with a non-genetically modified plant, while others do not, like parodied music? It’s not always just a matter of the nature of the product or market it operates in. At this point I’m just rambling. I think temporary monopolies awarded for innovation can be a good incentive (lots of debate on whether this is true or not), but in some places “temporary” was forgotten. It is more fitting to call it protectionist. I imagine that Disney will lobby hard to extend their exclusive property rights when Mickey Mouse comes up for expiration in the next couple years (I’ve heard there is a possibility extending the protection period to 125 years, if I remember correctly).

Anyways, this long post was written over two separate sittings (The Innocent Man documentary on Netflix got in the way) so it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Meh. The point is defining property is not easy, and from the looks of it, this court may have unfairly limited future innovation from creating a functioning secondary market in intangibles that doesn’t require a physical place to attach to. I think it’s amusing how the court actually said a person could find a lucrative way of buying 100 or so songs, loading it onto an iPod, and then sell it in the secondary market, as if that means that the person didn’t also keep the song on their hard drive. Sure, a secondary market could exist like that, but people aren’t going to want to shop for music on Craigslist like this- an alternative secondary market that is efficient could potentially exist if this case didn’t prevent it. The court seemed a bit ignorant to both technology and the fundamentals of what property is best described at its core- a right.

Side Note: ReDigi’s also claimed that their system was fair use, but was completely wrong. The court got it right on this front. Fair use implies some type of change in what the product is before selling it to others, like making a parody or using it for educational purposes. ReDigi’s system was nothing more than reselling the exact same product on the secondary market (or as the court found, just making an illegal replication). ReDigi claimed that their fair use was the creation of the secondary market. While creating a market is an innovative and separate creation, I don’t think it falls into the sphere of changing the files it sold or doing something that involved actually using the product for ancillary purposes other than straight up resell. ReDigi’s secondary market is not an instance of fair use.

*It is unclear if they are still in business for some other enterprise or not at the moment

**The case actually described how this was not truly the case. If a person bought a song from iTunes and uploaded it to their iCloud account, even after ReDigi’s software searched the owner’s computer for the file, it could not access their iCloud account to delete it. The original owner would still be able to access the file on their iCloud, while being able to sell the file to an ignorant ReDigi. Also, if someone copied the song onto a disk or other device not connected to the person’s computer hard drive, ReDigi’s software had no way of dealing with it. To me, this is the best grounds on which the court should have relied for why ReDigi’s business model was in violation of copyright laws.

[trendingnewsb]

5 Crazy Recent News Stories That Didn’t Get Enough Attention

Most people read the headlines of a couple of political stories shared by their most untrustworthy friend on Facebook and feel like they’re pretty well-informed. But the daily large-scale dramas of the Trump administration, mass shootings, Russian agents being assassinated, and the world generally seeming like a montage of newscasts from a ’50s sci-fi movie have overshadowed some utterly insane news that, in a different era, would have dominated headlines for weeks.

So here are five stories that have yet to receive the proper “Wait, what the fuck?!” reaction that they deserve.

5

The Government Said It Has Mysterious Alloys Recovered From UFOs

Two Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporters made public some fascinating footage captured by military pilots of an unidentified flying object zipping across the skies, making sharp turns and occasionally hovering like a helicopter, and all with no visible signs of propulsion. With the internet as it is, we should’ve been drowned in stories about how “Independence Day PREDICTED THE FUTURE” or whatever.

The footage is odd, for sure. But it only makes up like 0.5 percent of the craziness within the New York Times article it came from.

Read Next

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The article says that between 2007 and 2012, there was something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program running out of the Pentagon, where at least one employee had the X-Files theme as their ringtone and their co-workers hated them for it. Their task was to investigate mysterious aerial phenomena. While there’s a good chance they had a rubber stamp that read “It’s just another damn drone from Walmart” so they wouldn’t have to write it out all the time, the AATIP’s creator, former Senator Harry Reid, fought to secure the program’s findings, fearing that the United States would be helpless to defend itself from the technologies it discovered. That’s the kind of shit you say to justify keeping Magneto in a plastic cell underground.

Luis Elizondo, the former head of the AATIP, referenced “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” And most of the program’s $22 million budget over five years went to an aerospace technology company owned by a billionaire named Robert Bigelow, who 100 percent believes aliens have visited earth. And that brings us to the pant-shitting part:

“Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.”

Ah, OK. So. WHAT THE FUCK. Is it just a rash, or a headache, or are these people District 9-ing and morphing into a new species that should be shot in the head?

Live Science tried debunking some of the article’s claims by asking scientists and professors what they thought about it. Their grand conclusion is that there is no way an alloy could be unidentified. Thanks, guys. Excellent observation. There’s no way there are things out there that we don’t know! is some shit-ass expertise. They didn’t even try explaining the claim that the alloys are physically affecting people who interact with them. And it’s hard to blame them. If I think about it for a second, my brain goes to scary places that make me want to hide under a bed and cry.

The whole article makes it seem like there are a lot of high-ranking government officials who are certain aliens are real, that they have visited us, and we should probably fear what they might try to do to us. So on a day-to-day basis, you should feel a tinge of anxiety about your career, the well-being of your children, whether democracy will hold in America, and maybe also aliens with their poisonous ship junk.

4

A Man Spent Years Building His Own Submarine, Then Allegedly Used It To Brutally Murder A Journalist

Every once in a while, a sensational murder case — usually involving an attractive female victim — will take over the country for months. This case is weirder than every one of those combined, and nobody cared.

Peter Madsen had been building his own 55-foot submarine for years. We even wrote about his efforts back in 2010. Kim Wall was a freelance journalist who was just another in a long line to document Peter’s impressively productive waste of time. This sounds like the start of a quirky indie film.

But it’s fuckin’ not.

She set up an interview and two-hour test ride for August 10th, 2017. After the two hours were up, Wall’s boyfriend got suspicious that he hadn’t heard from her, so he called the police. Madsen was later rescued from his sinking submarine off the southern coast of Copenhagen — without Wall. Unless your passenger reveals their true kraken form, it’s weird to return to shore with fewer people than when you left. Madsen claimed that he dropped her off onshore hours earlier, which doesn’t quite align with the fact that her torso was found at sea days later.

At a pretrial hearing a couple of weeks later, Madsen testified that he buried Wall at sea after she was killed by a blow to the head from a 155-pound submarine hatch. Ah, the classic “She was murdered by the submarine, not me” defense. This did not hold up, as forensics found that her skull had no fractures and her throat had been either cut or strangled when she died. More of her body parts started washing up, and they concluded that her limbs had been forcibly removed with a saw and stuffed into plastic bags that were weighed down with metal pipes. She had also been stabbed 15 times.

Madsen’s trial is underway, and maybe it’s not getting any attention because everybody thinks they already know who did it? If so, doesn’t the fact that a man allegedly spent years building a murder submarine specifically so he could do this seem worthy of notice? What in the hell does it take to capture the national imagination these days?

3

There Is Now Software That Can Put Any Real Person Into Porn Videos, Including You Or Your Mom, Or Both

The future is NOW. Sadly, it’s only for creeps who want to jerk off to fake Scarlett Johansson porn. The technology that’s making it possible is called Deepfake. It’s an AI-driven software that can swap out a person’s face in video footage with someone else’s. Sometimes it’s convincing, other times it looks like their heads are painfully phasing in and out of reality.

That’s how you get Raiders Of The Lost Ark starring Nicolas Cage:

It’s also how you ruin the joke of an SNL sketch starring Nicolas Cage:

But it’s mostly for porn. And like all pursuits popular among sad lonely men, it was very popular on Reddit. Luckily, Reddit banned the Deepfakes subreddit not long after it was created — a bold moral stance for a site that lures you in with memes and then knocks you out with a one-two punch of white supremacy and misogyny. Bans on other big platforms like Discord, Twitter, and even PornHub soon followed, even though the underlying technology still exists for free on the internet.

What’s odd is that once it was banned across multiple sites, we reverted back to a pre-Deepfakes mindset, as if we don’t all live in the prologue of a new world where Donald Trump’s rumored pee tape might surface and the mere existence of Deepfakes would be enough for his supporters to call bullshit. We might one day look back at people on a subreddit putting Taylor Swift’s face on a porn star as innocent compared to a future in which a murderer whose face was clearly captured by security footage gets off scot-free because of the plausible deniability of Deepfakes. It’s a scary future where documented proof could be brushed away with a simple “That’s not me, that’s a fake — a deep fake” *winks at camera*.

Also, it means literally every woman who posts her face to the internet will wind up in a fake porn video / sex tape at some point. So there’s that, too.

2

A “Swatting” Prank Finally Got Someone Killed

You know what’s a real gut-busting joke that always leaves audiences rolling in the aisles? When SWAT teams charge into innocent people’s homes with shotguns and semiautomatic rifles drawn, intent on killing someone if it means stopping a hostage situation, all based on a tip obtained from a prank phone call. My sides! The sheer terror everyone involved must feel is making me pee a little!

If you don’t think it’s funny, then you’re not one of the many teenagers who’ve performed this “prank” because they’ve yet to develop a tangible fear of how utterly screwed their lives will be if the 9-1-1 call is traced back to them. The targets tend to be Twitch streamers, since a SWAT team’s entrance can turn an Overwatch stream into the drug raid scene from Goodfellas. Dozens of celebrities have also been swatted, like Miley Cyrus, Tom Cruise, and Clint Eastwood. Many of these people were lucky to not have been killed. SWAT teams have a long, horrific history of killing innocent people and/or their dogs during raids, in case you needed a cartoonishly ghoulish detail to further turn your stomach.

In an era when the media will drum up a moral panic over everything from violent video games to eating Tide Pods, you’d think this swatting thing would have been the subject of several congressional hearings by now. Especially since in December 2017, a swatting prank ended with someone dead, like every human who’d heard of swatting knew would eventually happen. Some random guys had placed a bet on the outcome of a Call Of Duty: WWII multiplayer match. An argument broke out, and one of the participants decided to get his just desserts by having a SWAT team sent to another person’s house. You know, as one does. The target of the swatting gave a false address. It was the home of a guy named Andrew Finch.

The person who initiated the swatting hired an intermediary to do it for them, Tyler Barriss. He was essentially a swatting hitman with a reputation for calling in swats on behalf of people who don’t want to get caught doing it themselves. And his Twitter handle was “SWauTistic,” because he’s a professional who believes in discretion. Barriss called the Wichita police and reported that someone at Finch’s house had shot their own father in the head and was holding their mother hostage. When Finch answered the knock at his door, a Wichita SWAT officer immediately pulled the trigger. Finch was unarmed and nonviolent. His friends say he didn’t even play video games.

Barriss has been charged with involuntary manslaughter, giving false alarm, and interference with a law enforcement officer. Finch’s mother is suing the Wichita Police Department. And even with a cop’s itchy trigger finger, there’s no denying that if Barriss had instead called and asked if Fincher’s refrigerator was running, he would still be alive today.

Swatting has become a dangerous trend which, unlike the aforementioned Tide Pod eating, is actually happening and is actually harming people. California State Senator Ted Lieu, New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, and Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark have all proposed anti-swatting legislation — all three have been swatted in response.

1

A Scandal Involving Cops Forcing Nude Photos From A Teenage Boy Ended In Suicide

Before I get into it, just know this story deals with the sexual molestation of a minor. So it’s not going to be as rip-roaringly funny as swatting.

17-year-old Trey Sims sent a video of his penis to his 15-year-old girlfriend. In the state of Virginia, this paradoxically made him the creator and victim of child pornography. The detective assigned to the case, David E. Abbott, obtained a warrant to take pictures of Sims’ penis to match it with the penis in the video, as if the police have a dick pic database that analyzes head-to-balls distance and pubic hair density to find a perfect match. Of course, all of this is necessary, since it’s so difficult to identify a dick when it doesn’t have a tattoo or a peg leg. Why that warrant wasn’t contested from the start is a mystery.

Another mystery is why, at one point, Abbott decided to start taking pictures of Sims’ penis with his personal cellphone.

Detective Abbot deemed the pictures insufficient, because somehow Sims couldn’t get erect with cops recording him masturbating. Which they had asked him to do, you know, so the pics would match the ones he was accused of sending. Wait, who is this law supposed to protect, again? Anyway, Abbot asked for a second state-sponsored permission slip to photograph a teenager’s erect penis. Abbott also threatened to force feed Sims erectile dysfunction pills, because he was determined to get a picture of a kid’s erect penis come hell or high water, goddamn it.

It was granted, but then halted after Sims’ lawyers made a big deal about the first dick pic photo shoot in the media, claiming the police had infringed upon Sims’ Fourth Amendment rights. That’s the one that prevents the government from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures, in essence calling James Madison an idiot for not foreseeing the need to include a line about the sovereignty of teenage dicks in the Constitution.

Charges against Sims were eventually dropped after he served probation. And with that out of the way, it was time to sue Abbott. But the focal point of the lawsuit shifted from Abbott to Claiborne T. Richardson II, the guy who approved both warrants. This shift happened after Abbott shot himself in his goddamned front yard right before county police officers were going to arrest him on suspicion of molesting boys when he was a youth hockey coach. I just want to reiterate here that this story was barely a blip on the national media’s radar.

Sims’ lawsuit was thrown out when a judge said that Richardson and Abbott were immune, since the Fourth Amendment surprisingly makes no mention of cops taking pictures of a teen’s penis. Everyone up and down the chain kept coming up with creative interpretations of the law to protect a dead detective who killed himself to avoid charges of molesting a minor. The common argument was that Abbott was just following orders. But he was the one who asked for the warrant. Has your head exploded yet?

After four years of this shit, the Fourth Circuit Court sided with Sims, finally deciding that teenage penises are in fact covered by the Fourth Amendment. See? Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.

Luis’ brain feels funny after he played with unknown alloys. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

A previous version of the column stated that Andrew Finch was playing Call of Duty and had been directly involved in the online argument before he was swatted. That was incorrect. The text has been changed to reflect that.

Uhhh … have a stress ball or several.

Support Cracked’s journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more stories you should have heard about but probably didn’t, check out 29 Pieces Of Good News That Got Choked Out By Trump Stories and 7 Pieces Of Good News About Huge Stories (No One Told You).

Has anyone told you we’re on Facebook?

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-crazy-recent-news-stories-that-didnt-get-enough-attention/

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[sheminecrafts]

How Facebook has reacted since the data misuse scandal broke

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be questioned by US lawmakers today about the “use and abuse of data” — following weeks of breaking news about a data misuse scandal dating back to 2014.

Facebook responds to data misuse

The Guardian published its first story linking Cambridge Analytica and Facebook user data in December 2015. The newspaper reported that the Ted Cruz campaign had paid UK academics to gather psychological profiles about the US electorate using “a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey”.

Post-publication, Facebook released just a few words to the newspaper — claiming it was “carefully investigating this situation”.

Yet more than a year passed with Facebook seemingly doing nothing to limit third party access to user data nor to offer more transparent signposting on how its platform could be — and was being — used for political campaigns.

Through 2015 Facebook had actually been ramping up its internal focus on elections as a revenue generating opportunity — growing the headcount of staff working directly with politicians to encourage them to use its platform and tools for campaigning. So it can hardly claim it wasn’t aware of the value of user data for political targeting.

Yet in November 2016 Zuckerberg publicly rubbished the idea that fake news spread via Facebook could influence political views — calling it a “pretty crazy idea”. This at the same time as Facebook the company was embedding its own staff with political campaigns to help them spread election messages.

Another company was also involved in the political ad targeting business. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica signed a contract with the Trump campaign. According to former employee Chris Wylie — who last month supplied documentary evidence to the UK parliament — it licensed Facebook users data for this purpose.

The data was acquired and processed by Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan whose personality quiz app, running on Facebook’s platform in 2014, was able to harvest personal data on tens of millions of users (a subset of which Kogan turned into psychological profiles for CA to use for targeting political messaging at US voters).

Cambridge Analytica has claimed it only licensed data on no more than 30M Facebook users — and has also claimed it didn’t actually use any of the data for the Trump campaign.

But this month Facebook confirmed that data on as many as 87M users was pulled via Kogan’s app.

What’s curious is that since March 17, 2018 — when the Guardian and New York Times published fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, estimating that around 50M Facebook users could have been affected — Facebook has released a steady stream of statements and updates, including committing to a raft of changes to tighten app permissions and privacy controls on its platform.

The timing of this deluge is not accidental. Facebook itself admits that many of the changes it’s announced since mid March were already in train — long planned compliance measures to respond to an incoming update to the European Union’s data protection framework, the GDPR.

If GDPR has a silver lining for Facebook — and a privacy regime which finally has teeth that can bite is not something you’d imagine the company would welcome — it’s that it can spin steps it’s having to make to comply with EU regulations as an alacritous and fine-grained response to a US political data scandal and try to generate  the impression it’s hyper sensitive to (now highly politicized) data privacy concerns.

Reader, the truth is far less glamorous. GDPR has been in the works for years and — like the Guardian’s original Cambridge Analytica scoop — its final text also arrived in December 2015.

On the GDPR prep front, in 2016 — during Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica ‘quiet period’ — the company itself told us it had assembled “the largest cross functional team” in the history of its family of companies to support compliance.

Facebook and Zuckerberg really has EU regulators to thank for forcing it to do so much of the groundwork now underpinning its response to this its largest ever data scandal.

Below is a quick timeline of how Facebook has reacted since mid March — when the story morphed into a major public scandal…

March 16, 2018: Just before the Guardian and New York Times publish fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook quietly drops the news that it has finally suspended CA/SCL. Why it didn’t do this years earlier remains a key question

March 17: In an update on the CA suspension Facebook makes a big show of rejecting the notion that any user data was ‘breached’. “People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” it writes

March 19: Facebook says it has hired digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to perform an audit on the political consulting and marketing firm Cambridge Analytica. It subsequently confirms its investigators have left the company’s UK offices at the request of the national data watchdog which is running its own investigation into use of data analytics for political purposes. The UK’s information commissioner publicly warns the company its staff could compromise her investigation

March 21: Zuckerberg announces further measures relating to the scandal — including a historical audit, saying apps and developers that do not agree to a “thorough audit” will be banned, and committing to tell all users whose data was misused. “We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well,” he writes on Facebook.

He also says developers’ access to user data will be removed if people haven’t used the app in three months. And says Facebook will also reduce the data users give to an app when they sign in — to just “your name, profile photo, and email address”.

Facebook will also require developers to not only get approval but also “sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data”, he says.

Another change he announces in the post: Facebook will start showing users a tool at the top of the News Feed “to make sure you understand which apps you’ve allowed to access your data” and with “an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data”.

He concedes that while Facebook already had a tool to do this in its privacy settings people may not have seen or known that it existed.

These sorts of changes are very likely related to GDPR compliance.

Another change the company announces on this day is that it will expand its bug bounty program to enable people to report misuse of data.

It confirms that some of the changes it’s announced were already in the works as a result of the EU’s GDPR privacy framework — but adds: “This week’s events have accelerated our efforts”

March 25: Facebook apologizes for the data scandal with a full page ad in newspapers in the US and UK

March 28: Facebook announces changes to privacy settings to make them easier to find and use. It also says terms of services changes aimed at improving transparency are on the way — also all likely to be related to GDPR compliance

March 29: Facebook says it will close down a 2013 feature called Partner Categories — ending the background linking of its user data holdings with third party data held by major data brokers. Also very likely related to GDPR compliance

At the same time, in an update on parallel measures it’s taking to fight election interference, Facebook says it will launch a public archive in the summer showing “all ads that ran with a political label”. It specifies this will show the ad creative itself; how much money was spent on each ad; the number of impressions it received; and the demographic information about the audience reached. Ads will be displayed in the archive for four years after they ran

April 1: Facebook confirms to us that it is working on a certification tool that requires marketers using its Custom Audience ad targeting platform to guarantee email addresses were rightfully attained and users consented to their data being used them for marketing purposes — apparently attempting to tighten up its ad targeting system (again, GDPR is the likely driver for that)

April 3: Facebook releases the bulk app deletion tool Zuckerberg trailed as coming in the wake of the scandal — though this still doesn’t give users a select all option, but it makes the process a lot less tedious than it was.

It also announces culling a swathe of IRA Russian troll farm pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It adds that it will be updating its help center tool “in the next few weeks” to enable people to check whether they liked or followed one of these pages. It’s not clear whether it will also proactively push notifications to affected users

April 4: Facebook outs a rewrite of its T&Cs — again, likely a compliance measure to try to meet GDPR’s transparency requirements — making it clearer to users what information it collects and why. It doesn’t say why it took almost 15 years to come up with a plain English explainer of the user data it collects

April 4: Buried in an update on a range of measures to reduce data access on its platform — such as deleting Messenger users’ call and SMS metadata after a year, rather than retaining it — Facebook reveals it has disabled a search and account recovery tool after “malicious actors” abused the feature — warning that “most” Facebook users will have had their public info scraped by unknown entities.

The company also reveals a breakdown of the top ten countries affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leakage, and subsequently reveals 2.7M of the affected users are EU citizens

April 6: Facebook says it will require admins of popular pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location — in an effort to fight disinformation on its platform. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked

April 9: Facebook says it will begin informing users if their data was passed to Cambridge Analytica from today by dropping a notification into the News Feed.

It also offers a tool where people can do a manual check

April 9: Facebook also announces an initiative aimed at helping social science researchers gauge the product’s impact on elections and political events.

The initiative is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Facebook says the researchers will be given access to “privacy-protected datasets” — though it does not detail how people’s data will be robustly anonymized — and says it will not have any right or review or approval on research findings prior to publication.

Zuckerberg claims the election research commission will be “independent” of Facebook and will define the research agenda, soliciting research on the effects of social media on elections and democracy

April 10: Per its earlier announcement, Facebook begins blocking apps from accessing user data 90 days after non-use. It also rolls out the earlier trailed updates to its bug bounty program

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2Hpw3Vt via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be questioned by US lawmakers today about the “use and abuse of data” — following weeks of breaking news about a data misuse scandal dating back to 2014.

Facebook responds to data misuse

The Guardian published its first story linking Cambridge Analytica and Facebook user data in December 2015. The newspaper reported that the Ted Cruz campaign had paid UK academics to gather psychological profiles about the US electorate using “a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey”.

Post-publication, Facebook released just a few words to the newspaper — claiming it was “carefully investigating this situation”.

Yet more than a year passed with Facebook seemingly doing nothing to limit third party access to user data nor to offer more transparent signposting on how its platform could be — and was being — used for political campaigns.

Through 2015 Facebook had actually been ramping up its internal focus on elections as a revenue generating opportunity — growing the headcount of staff working directly with politicians to encourage them to use its platform and tools for campaigning. So it can hardly claim it wasn’t aware of the value of user data for political targeting.

Yet in November 2016 Zuckerberg publicly rubbished the idea that fake news spread via Facebook could influence political views — calling it a “pretty crazy idea”. This at the same time as Facebook the company was embedding its own staff with political campaigns to help them spread election messages.

Another company was also involved in the political ad targeting business. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica signed a contract with the Trump campaign. According to former employee Chris Wylie — who last month supplied documentary evidence to the UK parliament — it licensed Facebook users data for this purpose.

The data was acquired and processed by Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan whose personality quiz app, running on Facebook’s platform in 2014, was able to harvest personal data on tens of millions of users (a subset of which Kogan turned into psychological profiles for CA to use for targeting political messaging at US voters).

Cambridge Analytica has claimed it only licensed data on no more than 30M Facebook users — and has also claimed it didn’t actually use any of the data for the Trump campaign.

But this month Facebook confirmed that data on as many as 87M users was pulled via Kogan’s app.

What’s curious is that since March 17, 2018 — when the Guardian and New York Times published fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, estimating that around 50M Facebook users could have been affected — Facebook has released a steady stream of statements and updates, including committing to a raft of changes to tighten app permissions and privacy controls on its platform.

The timing of this deluge is not accidental. Facebook itself admits that many of the changes it’s announced since mid March were already in train — long planned compliance measures to respond to an incoming update to the European Union’s data protection framework, the GDPR.

If GDPR has a silver lining for Facebook — and a privacy regime which finally has teeth that can bite is not something you’d imagine the company would welcome — it’s that it can spin steps it’s having to make to comply with EU regulations as an alacritous and fine-grained response to a US political data scandal and try to generate  the impression it’s hyper sensitive to (now highly politicized) data privacy concerns.

Reader, the truth is far less glamorous. GDPR has been in the works for years and — like the Guardian’s original Cambridge Analytica scoop — its final text also arrived in December 2015.

On the GDPR prep front, in 2016 — during Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica ‘quiet period’ — the company itself told us it had assembled “the largest cross functional team” in the history of its family of companies to support compliance.

Facebook and Zuckerberg really has EU regulators to thank for forcing it to do so much of the groundwork now underpinning its response to this its largest ever data scandal.

Below is a quick timeline of how Facebook has reacted since mid March — when the story morphed into a major public scandal…

March 16, 2018: Just before the Guardian and New York Times publish fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook quietly drops the news that it has finally suspended CA/SCL. Why it didn’t do this years earlier remains a key question

March 17: In an update on the CA suspension Facebook makes a big show of rejecting the notion that any user data was ‘breached’. “People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” it writes

March 19: Facebook says it has hired digital forensics firm Stroz Friedberg to perform an audit on the political consulting and marketing firm Cambridge Analytica. It subsequently confirms its investigators have left the company’s UK offices at the request of the national data watchdog which is running its own investigation into use of data analytics for political purposes. The UK’s information commissioner publicly warns the company its staff could compromise her investigation

March 21: Zuckerberg announces further measures relating to the scandal — including a historical audit, saying apps and developers that do not agree to a “thorough audit” will be banned, and committing to tell all users whose data was misused. “We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well,” he writes on Facebook.

He also says developers’ access to user data will be removed if people haven’t used the app in three months. And says Facebook will also reduce the data users give to an app when they sign in — to just “your name, profile photo, and email address”.

Facebook will also require developers to not only get approval but also “sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data”, he says.

Another change he announces in the post: Facebook will start showing users a tool at the top of the News Feed “to make sure you understand which apps you’ve allowed to access your data” and with “an easy way to revoke those apps’ permissions to your data”.

He concedes that while Facebook already had a tool to do this in its privacy settings people may not have seen or known that it existed.

These sorts of changes are very likely related to GDPR compliance.

Another change the company announces on this day is that it will expand its bug bounty program to enable people to report misuse of data.

It confirms that some of the changes it’s announced were already in the works as a result of the EU’s GDPR privacy framework — but adds: “This week’s events have accelerated our efforts”

March 25: Facebook apologizes for the data scandal with a full page ad in newspapers in the US and UK

March 28: Facebook announces changes to privacy settings to make them easier to find and use. It also says terms of services changes aimed at improving transparency are on the way — also all likely to be related to GDPR compliance

March 29: Facebook says it will close down a 2013 feature called Partner Categories — ending the background linking of its user data holdings with third party data held by major data brokers. Also very likely related to GDPR compliance

At the same time, in an update on parallel measures it’s taking to fight election interference, Facebook says it will launch a public archive in the summer showing “all ads that ran with a political label”. It specifies this will show the ad creative itself; how much money was spent on each ad; the number of impressions it received; and the demographic information about the audience reached. Ads will be displayed in the archive for four years after they ran

April 1: Facebook confirms to us that it is working on a certification tool that requires marketers using its Custom Audience ad targeting platform to guarantee email addresses were rightfully attained and users consented to their data being used them for marketing purposes — apparently attempting to tighten up its ad targeting system (again, GDPR is the likely driver for that)

April 3: Facebook releases the bulk app deletion tool Zuckerberg trailed as coming in the wake of the scandal — though this still doesn’t give users a select all option, but it makes the process a lot less tedious than it was.

It also announces culling a swathe of IRA Russian troll farm pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram. It adds that it will be updating its help center tool “in the next few weeks” to enable people to check whether they liked or followed one of these pages. It’s not clear whether it will also proactively push notifications to affected users

April 4: Facebook outs a rewrite of its T&Cs — again, likely a compliance measure to try to meet GDPR’s transparency requirements — making it clearer to users what information it collects and why. It doesn’t say why it took almost 15 years to come up with a plain English explainer of the user data it collects

April 4: Buried in an update on a range of measures to reduce data access on its platform — such as deleting Messenger users’ call and SMS metadata after a year, rather than retaining it — Facebook reveals it has disabled a search and account recovery tool after “malicious actors” abused the feature — warning that “most” Facebook users will have had their public info scraped by unknown entities.

The company also reveals a breakdown of the top ten countries affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leakage, and subsequently reveals 2.7M of the affected users are EU citizens

April 6: Facebook says it will require admins of popular pages and advertisers buying political or “issue” ads on “debated topics of national legislative importance” like education or abortion to verify their identity and location — in an effort to fight disinformation on its platform. Those that refuse, are found to be fraudulent or are trying to influence foreign elections will have their Pages prevented from posting to the News Feed or their ads blocked

April 9: Facebook says it will begin informing users if their data was passed to Cambridge Analytica from today by dropping a notification into the News Feed.

It also offers a tool where people can do a manual check

April 9: Facebook also announces an initiative aimed at helping social science researchers gauge the product’s impact on elections and political events.

The initiative is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Facebook says the researchers will be given access to “privacy-protected datasets” — though it does not detail how people’s data will be robustly anonymized — and says it will not have any right or review or approval on research findings prior to publication.

Zuckerberg claims the election research commission will be “independent” of Facebook and will define the research agenda, soliciting research on the effects of social media on elections and democracy

April 10: Per its earlier announcement, Facebook begins blocking apps from accessing user data 90 days after non-use. It also rolls out the earlier trailed updates to its bug bounty program

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Hpw3Vt Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com