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the-final-sif · 11 months ago

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One of the things I think people as a whole don't understand about the internet today is that so much of what's wrong/dangerous/flawed about the internet exists because so much of the internet started as one person's hobby they built in their spare time or as a specific task for a specific function that was just useful/functional enough that literally everyone started using it. There's tons of biases built into the modern internet and some of that is carelessness but a lot of it is... just like. This was invented by a group of grad students fucking around for a few weeks. How the fuck were they supposed to know it'd be become the global standard and that nobody would bother to address or change these things?

Like, the whole reason that the US government gets the ".gov" domain name is because this entire system was invented in the US primarily for use in universities. Under the original system, you had to phone in to talk to the center who owned the list, tell them what name you wanted and then a person would type your name/ip onto the list attached to a nickname much like a phonebook. Then people slowly figured out domains and maintaining domain registries. And then the system became useful enough that more of the US started using it, and then people realized "oh shit, other countries want to use this too, guess we need to figure that out".

The "world wide web" or the thing we all know as the internet (and the reason that every website you visit has www in front), was invented originally by one dude trying to make his own job easier (Tim Berners-Lee). He thought it was pretty cool and shared it, and he was one guy who only spoke English and was just doing what he thought was going to work.

Like, this is a very lighthearted article talking about him, but I think it illustrates the point really well,

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has confessed that the // in a web address were actually "unnecessary". He told the Times newspaper that he could easily have designed URLs not to have the forward slashes. "There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time," he said. He admitted that when he devised the web, almost 20 years ago, he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause "so much hassle". His light-hearted apology even had a green angle as he accepted that having to add // to every address had wasted time, printing and paper.

via "sorry for the slashs"

We have an entire internet and infrastructure built rather haphazardly but also in such a way that going back and trying to change or fix things either requires an insane amount of work or could render vast swaths of the prior internet inaccessible.

Like, I think everyone here remembers Flash getting shut down and how much of childhood games got wiped off the generally accessible internet and relegated to projects like Flashpoint. It was really hard to see, but Flash was also a project started in 1996 (or 1993 if you count the OG version that turned into flash) that was supposed to be for a limited set of use cases, and not the medium on which major parts of the internet would run. By the time Adobe shut it down, Flash was incredibly dangerous with the constant risks of malware, it was buggy, slow, and there were a million better programs. It had to be killed to make way for better things, but because of how the internet was built, that death came at a pretty high cost.

So if you're ever wondering why it feels like the web is a bunch of dominoes ready to fall down at any time, it's because it is. And it does. And so many people spend so much of their time combating all the problems created by using systems that were never intended to handle everything they are currently handling because the alternative is a task of monstrous undertaking that would almost certainly turn decades of history to dust.

#sif speaks #internet culture #internet security #idk I just like #see people talking about the internet in such a way that shows they do not understand it #like I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people these days could not describe the difference between the internet and #www #and like #that says a lot

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Universities secretly sold their students to online casinos

End-stage capitalism’s defining characteristic is making money rather than making things. Think of how Jack Welch destroyed GE by transforming it from a manufacturing company to a financial engineering shop:

https://the.ink/p/like-capitalism-itself-business-journalism

Hospitals are invoice-generating factories with a sideline in medicine. The electronic health record only incidentally records your health. Its primary purpose is to record your billing-codes:

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/physicians-spending-nearly-2-hours-a-day-on-ehr-tasks-outside-work.html

And universities? Ugh. Most universities now have more administrators than faculty:

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/08/administrative-bloat-harms-teaching-and-learning/

Much of that “administration” comes down to begging alums for money to funnel into vast endowments, but heaven forfend those endowments would be used to cover payroll and other essentials, even in a pandemic emergency:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/reneemorad/2020/04/21/harvard-under-fire-for-accepting-nearly-9-million-in-coronavirus-relief-funds/

Nor are endowment funds available to pay the education workers who actually teach students, but can’t afford the rent, food, or family:

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/11/14/nearly-50000-university-of-california-graduate-student-employees-launch-open-ended-strike/

The point of the endowment is to increase the size of the endowment — not to improve educational outcomes or research. That’s why Harvard is “A hedge fund that has a university”:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hedge-fund-that-has-a-university-1510615228

This is the overwhelming logic of capital: capital exists to increase capital, and the underlying mechanism for that increase is irrelevant. This was the reasoning behind the surreal bid to sell the .ORG nonprofit registry to a secretive hedge-fund.

The point of the .ORG registry is to host domain records for nonprofits; incidentally, this throws off some extra money that is turned into grants for public interest projects. The board decided to sell off .ORG so it could make more of these grants, despite the fact that this would compromise the mission of hosting .ORG domain records:

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/org-domain-registry-sale-ethos-capital-rejected-stunning-victory-public-interest

Likewise, this was the reasoning of the Mountain Equipment Co-Op board when they decided to sell off the member-owned co-op (“the most trusted brand in Canada”) to a US private equity fund without consulting the members:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/16/spike-lee-joint/#casse-le-mec

The expand-capital-at-all-costs mindset is a virulent species of brain worms. It’s the basis for surreal movements like effective altruism, which encourages people who want to do good for the world to sell out to the most toxic industries on Earth, amass gigantic fortunes, and then, upon their death, donate them to causes that in some way remediate the harms they themselves wreaked:

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

In his new book Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff calls this “The Mindset” — “I need to make vast amounts of money, no matter what the consequences, or I will not be able to afford to insulate myself from the consequences of how I made all that money”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Once you let people with The Mindset anywhere near your institution, they will take it over and turn it into a paperclip-maximizing killing machine, one that abandons and then betrays its mission to increase its profits, eventually killing its host. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop:

https://doctorow.medium.com/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop-110ba9711133

That’s what’s happened to higher ed. It’s not just the payroll full of starving adjuncts, facilities workers, etc. It’s not just the way that universities join forces with textbook monopolists to gouge their students:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#textbook-abuses

Beyond academics having to rely on food-stamps, students going into lifetime debt to enrich predatory textbook monopolies, and the other horrors of financialized higher ed, there’s the special evil of college sports.

Like all finance-bro motivated reasoning, college sports are sold as a way to do well by doing good: “Look! We’re giving poor people a chance at a great education based on their physical prowess, and we’re racking up tons of money for the university!”

But — like all finance schemes — college sports is a self-licking ice-cream cone that destroys the lives of the people who generate value for it, even as it devours its host institution from within.

Did you know that until very recently, college athletes weren’t allowed to make a penny from their labor?

https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/06/in-unanimous-ruling-court-agrees-with-athletes-that-ncaa-violated-antitrust-laws/

Did you know that those same athletes experience lifelong brain injuries?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2791303

Did you know that college sports are a cesspit of long-term, officially tolerated sexual abuse?

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/30/ohio-state-michigan-doctors-sexual-abuse-college-football

Did you know that the highest paid public employee in many states is a football coach at a state college?

https://www.profootballnetwork.com/highest-paid-college-football-coaches-2022/

Did you know that college coaches conspired with the rich parents to steal sport-related admission slots from poor kids and give them to mediocre winners of the orifice-lottery?

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

In many universities — whether public or private — the sports program effectively runs the show. Take the University of New Hampshire: back in 2016, a university librarian named Robert Morin left his life’s savings to the school after 50 years of service. Morin lived frugally for that half century and amassed a personal fortune of $4m.

He believed so deeply in the university’s mission that he turned it all over to the school without any restrictions. Talk about earning to give! The university blew Morin’s gift on a new jumbotron for their sports stadium:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/16/university-to-buy-1-million-football-scoreboard-with-thrifty-librarians-money-outraging-critics/

The people who see universities as inconvenient adjuncts to exploitative sports teams know that there are still rivals within higher ed who think the point of the school is to educate students.

That’s why the universities that arranged to allow sports gambling websites to target the young people in their care did so in secret.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/caesars-sports-betting-universities-colleges.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUZAybfQMMmqBCdnr_EybEnj2XlaTONTixe1KEfDpSc-kHCILdlZsU-xS-aWN5MK_okQ_h2w-BSJAptVwys6NOiqagyHh8U-8i1T39kmNXER6w5-jvnKWDmIe5ymOTn-hvbbzH1XKzbg2lxIVpvvZY2d12t3yMDwKmVFfVnmYUrhYdXDZ54TT8KZiWY7bK_W1glZoLwPlyL4RI2WupZRTnQgdWfjrsCew5TAl7FJ2httSd-sJgPfYNKY9usakIoa8H8gr4OCmd3LYvPBpQ5RILck70Coqf9dPDE9RFVhqXegnp2EK4F

Writing for the New York Times, Anna Betts, Andrew Little, Elizabeth Sander, Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly and Walt Bogdanich reveal the extraordinary corruption and depravity of college administrators who colluded with sports book companies to bring gambling to campus.

Implicated in the scandal are such top schools as Michigan State, U Colorado Bolder, Louisiana State, Syracuse and Texas Christian Univeristy (mission: “to educate individuals to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens”).

On the casino side, the major player is Caesar’s, which is only fitting — Caesar’s was driven to bankruptcy by private equity who managed to financialize a casino into ruin:

https://www.ft.com/content/a0ed27c6-a2d4-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2

Caesar’s offered universities millions of dollars for the right to directly sports betting to students. The MSU deal, brokered by university officials Paul Schager and Alan Haller, was worth $8.4m. That is to say, Caesar’s was asking the university to help it drain at least $8.4m from students’ bank accounts in order to turn a profit.

Louisiana State U did a similar deal with Caesar’s, and then embarked on a direct marketing campaign to sell sports gambling to students who were too young to legally place a bet.

LSU says this was a mistake. Cody Worsham, a university official who holds two offices — associate athletic director and chief brand officer (!!) — said that Caesar’s and LSU “share a commitment to responsible, age-appropriate marketing.”

Meanwhile, U Colorado Boulder struck a deal where it earned a $30 bounty every time a student went from non-gambler to gambler — in other words, Boulder didn’t make money by advertising gambling to students — it made money only if its students started gambling.

These student gambling programs are designed to keep children betting even if they lose money, with teaser offers that refund some losses if students keep placing bets.

This is obviously unsavory stuff. That’s why the architects of these programs went to enormous lengths to keep it secret. The state schools involved funneled their deals through private marketing agencies that were shielded from FOIA requests, specifically to prevent the public from learning how public universities were conducting their affairs.

As MSU executive associate athletic director Paul Schager put it: “With the multimedia rights holder, public institutions like Michigan State no longer have to disclose all those sponsorship deals. This helps with the sponsors being able to spend what they feel is appropriate without having the public or employees or stockholders question that investment.”

The deals themselves are far-reaching. As part of MSU’s Caesar’s deal, tailgate parties before big games would be “Caesarized,” with the casino providing ad-copy for the live announcers to read to attendees. As a figleaf, $25,000 of the millions that MSU received from Caesar’s was earmarked for gambling addiction education.

The deals weren’t just kept secret from the public — they were also hidden from top university oversight. At UC Bolder, the Board of Regents was informed of the deal mere hours before it was announced to the public.

These deals have only been running for a couple months and it’s too soon to chart the long-term harms they’ll create in the student body. But, the Times* notes, there is an one harm that surfaced almost immediately: student athletes are now subject to vicious abuse by their fellow students, who lose money they can’t afford when their peers lose a game.

[Image ID: A gaudy casino floor. In the foreground is a figure in college graduation robes giving a double thumbs-up. His head is a grinning skull with a mortarboard.]

#pluralistic

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itsbenedict · 2 months ago

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From the beginning | Previously | Coin standings | 60/70 | 40/40

Adea will thank you to remember that this is her pathetic wet cat, thank you very much. Who among us has not seen a man have a seizure from eating a weird bug he found on the ground, and decided to marry him on the spot? Sometimes you just see a tiny insane philosophy professor in a sweater vest who would die if you didn't protect him, and nature takes over! He's scrunkly, okay? Shut up!

It once again falls to her to save her husband from the results of a sudden fit of gap moe, but she came prepared. She's got those DEVELOPER TOOLS, which, if she understands correctly, are like a technology thing that will tell you what's wrong with someone.

She pokes him with the needle, and...

Error: global entity index not found. No source record was retrieved. Deferring to local entity registry lookup. Error: floating process ID found for local entity "Walter Rehoots", but integrity checksum for "Walter Rehoots" failed. Access to insecure resource blocked. Examine insecure data with "oldtroopsleeve 'Walter Rehoots' --unsafe --pretty-print-source".

What the hell? What does any of that mean? Is this thing broken, or is something more wrong with him than she thought?

...She tests it on herself, and gets the exact same error message, except with her own name. Okay. Uh. Examine insecure data with... what, is it this button? Now she's seeing... just a load of incomprehensible computer nonsense. There's some stuff that's legible, though...

So, you're both "local entities", and have IDs for your names, but there's something called a checksum that isn't working. Maybe you need to get your checksums fixed? Do they make a cream for that?

There's a warning about "excessive data duplication" and "insecure defaults" that doesn't make much sense.

Okay, here's something- an age timestamp. He's... 45?! No, wait, what the- he was 30, last you checked. And- what the hell, you're 43?! No no no no no. That's not true. This thing's broken.

You've got these weird little labels on you with a flower icon next to them- you're labeled "ROBUST LONERS" and he's labeled "SORROW TO LEGS", which doesn't tell you much. Is he catatonic because his legs are sad???

There's a thing in your data called an ARCADE COOKING KIT, which apparently expired a few hours ago. Says here it denied over a thousand requests because they were from the wrong domain. Does this have anything to do with where you woke up?

Walter is "COAL-IMBUED" and you're "ACIDIC PIRATE", which is weird because he's always been big on green energy, and Talk Like A Pirate Day was yesterday.

You... don't find anything useful vis-a-vis snapping him out of this weird signal stabilizer fugue he put himself in, though. He seems... fine, except for all the mysterious crap that's not fine that you can't make heads or tails of. This thing is useless!

Walter interrupts to remind you that she's dead, she's dead, it's all pointless- and you flick him in the head. She's not dead, you tell him- and he says he saw it, saw her corpse being dragged away. You flick him in the head again and ask how and when he saw it, and whether he's sure he wasn't just seeing things.

This gets him quiet, but the kind of quiet where he's thinking. That philosophy brain, asking nerd questions like "why do I believe what I believe".

Both of you, actually, have been very obviously hallucinating a lot of crazy shit this entire time. Like, constantly. Just because he saw his DEAD DAUGHTER doesn't mean she's dead- maybe he was just thinking about how he TRUDGED AHEAD or whatever. You can't give up just because you had a mysterious vision. You are both objectively crazy people right now. It makes no sense to abandon all hope before you've had the chance to, like, get to a hospital and get medical care!

Walter sits there thinking for a couple solid minutes, which you let him do, and then he gets to his feet and wordlessly hugs you tight.

Alright. Okay. What now?

Continued | 60/70 | 39/39

#lost in hearts

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parafiles · 3 months ago

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Toonimal was not suspended by its domain registrar/registry. If it was, you wouldn't be able to load even an error page. It was suspended by its hosting provider, and assuming Ezra took backups, it could be restored on another hosting provider.

relayed to the rest of the team. thanks for the correction!

at least it was taken down

-mod ramen

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loganlynn · 11 months ago

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Cute things that happened this year, part 8: Celebrated my 5th year as PR + Creative Director of the .gay domain, which was welcomed by GoDaddy Registry into its portfolio in 2023.

I love what we have accomplished so far with this brand and I am so honored that I get to continue to help oversee it in this next exciting chapter with GoDaddy.

Come be gay with us on the internet, bbs! 🏳️‍🌈

#loganlynn #godaddy #GoDaddy registry #tech #DotGay #.gay #gay #queer #internet #domain #domains #top level domains

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stvlti · 1 year ago

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Snippet from my untitled Blue Beetle & Teen Titans rejects fic :)

Click. Snap. Click. Snap.

They're sat inside a Big Belly Burger, waiting for their order of fries. A female singer he doesn't recognise croons Spanglish over weirdly retro beats on the speakers. Eddie is fidgeting with the catch on his now-useless slider phone, out of nerves or boredom, he doesn't know.

The first thing they did once they got into town was to buy a mobile phone. It's strange, but there aren't many payphones around, and whatever happened to them while they were in the Bleed and subsequently in their fall back to Earth must have fried their cellphones. Luckily, he found one of those rundown stores selling spare electronics for cheap that accepts cash and doesn't ask questions. At least one thing hasn't changed.

Click. Snap. Click. Snap.

The phone they bought is a palm-sized thing with a wide touch-screen, one of those smart-phone models that only came out last year, and yet the store owner seemed almost happy to part with it. "It's ancient," he'd said in a comfortingly thick accent, "I was about to chuck it out with the garbage. I'd sell it to you for free, chiquito." Things only get stranger from there. It took less than a minute for Khaji to jail break the phone and recalibrate itself to the local network. They tried his family's numbers again, even tried the Titans Tower secure line, but no dice. What Jaime found on the internet was even less reassuring.

Click. Snap. Click. Snap.

"Hey, Eddie."

The fidgeting stops.

"Could you go grab us some drinks? I need a minute alone with the scarab."

"Sure...?" Eddie throws another glance at Jaime, not quite hiding his worry as he slides out of his seat.

[ You were vexed by his opening and shutting of his phone case. ]

"I didn't realise it was state the obvious hour."

Khaji Da does not respond. Jaime rubs his temple.

"Sorry, sorry. Yes, I'm stressed. Tell me you have some good news, at least."

[ You are still alive, as is Eddie Bloomberg. You have enough money to acquire sustenance for another week, during which I can help you find a job and — ]

"Khaji. I need to get home."

[ You are technically in your hometown. ]

"But it's not the El Paso I know. Right? Tell me I'm not crazy."

[ Jaime Reyes is correct. Based on our quick search of the government domains, social network platforms and news sites, the Reyes family never lived in El Paso. There is no record of your parents or extended family in the state registry. Your name does not exist in the class registers of your high school. Your sister— ]

"Also doesn't exist! I know! I got it the first time." Jaime looks over to the self-service machine. What is taking Eddie so long? "I asked you for good news, Khaji."

[ Actually, your sister exists. Milagro Reyes, age 18, enrolled in Edge Keys High School. According to her posts on Instagram, she was last seen at the Kord Centre Mall — ]

"Did you say eighteen? And where the heck is Edge Key?"

[ I have some more good news. While there is no record of your other family members in the state of Texas, a Reyes Auto Repair Shop was recently removed from the business registry in Edge Key, Greater Palmera City. ]

"What? We have to go to Edge Key!"

"What's Edge Key?" Eddie sets a tray down, almost spilling the two extra-large cups of soda balanced precariously on it. The fries look tiny in comparison.

"That's what I'm trying to find out. Khaji, can you — hold on, I'm syncing you to the phone so Eddie can see."

The phone lights up, and Jaime expects Khaji's words to crawl across the screen like text messages the way he's done the few times Jaime tried to sync the scarab to his old phone via blue-tooth. Instead, the phone starts talking in a lady computer voice.

"Your scarab was a chick this whole time?" Eddie exclaims, the half-chewed fry in his hand forgotten.

"What? No! I didn't even know it could speak like this."

"I simply utilised this phone's built-in text-to-speech system. It is not my problem that the manufacturers could only imagine AI voices as female."

"I think it just insulted every super-computer in the cape community..."

"Anyway, the coordinates?"

[ There is one last thing you should know before you go, Jaime Reyes. The Blue Beetle was last sighted in Palmera City six hours ago. ]

The boys pause and look at each other.

"Show me, Khaji."

And on the screen of the phone appears a crisp, 4K picture of a guy in a costume that looks exactly like him, mid-flight in the streets of a city he's never been to.

#jaime reyes #eddie bloomberg #teen titans #blue beetle #kid devil #I typed 3 chapters of this au for 3 hours straight and now my hand is fucked :')#I still have shit to prep for tomorrow but I'm ok. I'M OKAY #stvlti writes

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