#eff google

[karadin]

online resources

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents,

thanks Christopher Seymore for links

[enter-the-bear-circle]

Welcome to Sanremo 2025 green carpet! We have:

A grieving widow at the funeral of her 5th husband

Unconventional bride

Unconventional bride's bride

Your aunt and uncle on a date night

Miley Cyrus

10 y.o. girl raiding mom's closet

10 y.o. boy raiding mom's closet

Hailey Williams in her best era

Mom warned you about them

How dare you question my emotional support medieval helmet?!!

Enjoy your stay!

[rachymarie]

Targeted ads, contact syncing, etc are the worst as a schizospec

[fizzingwizard]

me: *opens an email*

Google pop-up: HEYYY DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN SNOOZE AN EMAIL SO YOU CAN READ IT LATER? LET ME SHOW YOU!!!!!!! *closes the email*

me: ... I was about to read that

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

Google Does Yet Another Infuriating Thing

Google is looking for women to be "Google Tech Ambassadors".

Ambassadors are expected to do at least 10 hours of work per quarter—for free.

From the site:

Opportunities like this already exist. Google is not doing anything new with this initiative.

Google is not offering meaningful opportunities or practical support.

Google is asking people who are already overscheduled to take on more work on an unpaid basis.

As one of my colleagues replied, "It's a shame Google isn't a huge company that could afford to remunerate women for their efforts".

Google could take this idea and put resources towards supporting the programs that already exist and need funding and practical support.

This is not helping women in tech advance their careers.

This is not growing the tech community.

This is yet another company asking women to work for free in order to bolster its own image.

[monetizeme]

When a company makes a promise, the public should be able to rely on it. Today, nearly every person in the U.S. is a customer of either Amazon or Google—and many of us are customers of both technology giants. Both of these companies have made public promises that they will ensure their technologies are not being used to facilitate human rights violations. These promises are not just corporate platitudes; they’re commitments to every customer and to society at large.  

It’s a reasonable thing to ask if these promises are being kept. And it’s especially important since Amazon and Google have been increasingly implicated by reports that their technologies, specifically their joint cloud computing initiative called Project Nimbus, are being used to facilitate mass surveillance and human rights violations of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. This was the basis of our public call in August 2024 for the companies to come clean about their involvement. 

[stochasm]

Please do not listen to posts like this. Using too many Adblockers makes it easier to track you. Again: using too many adblockers makes it easier to track you. Read more below:

Adblockers (and most tracking blockers) work by comparing the resources your browser is asked to fetch against a large list of ad and tracking domains. They block all the resources they think are related to ads or tracking. That’s great, but it’s not perfect, and there’s a continual arms race between advertisers and list creators to evade or subvert these rules (e.g. Google's Web Bundles).

The key here is that every extension has their own set of rules which all block different domains. These unique rules can be used by a smart adversary to determine which adblocker you are using. By loading a bunch of resources and seeing which ones get blocked, it’s easy to see which tool is doing the blocking. The problem with using a bunch of tools is that most people don’t, so when you do, you stand out.

Let’s say that 5 million people use uBlock Origin. Already you've reducing the number of people you could be from over a billion to less than a percent of that. How many of those 5 million use Ghostery too? Probably less than a fourth of them. How many of that group also use TrackMeNot? AdNauseam? Adblocker ultimate? It only takes a few rare behaviors to make you uniquely identifiable.

And there are a couple of specific issues with specific tools:

Ghostery sells your data.

AdNauseam is mostly theater and doesn't do much of anything, especially not when other extensions are getting in its way.

HTTPS everywhere isn't needed, it's default behavior in Firefox now.

Facebook Container is also now built in to Firefox. Just turn on the Containers functionality.

Stop just installing things. More is not better. Here's the list I use:

UBlock Origin (by far the best general-purpose adblocker)

Privacy Badger (blocks tracking stuff)

That's all you need. There are a few more tools that don't do anything companies can notice, but do make the browsing experience better:

ClearURLs (removes referral links client-side, making it harder to understand who is sharing what with who)

Unpaywall (Finds preprint or open access versions of papers)

SponsorBlock (makes YouTube bearable)

Using DuckDuckGo or Searx (this is an obvious one)

In addition to all this, you should respect the default Firefox behaviors of blocking non-HTTPS requests and not allowing third-party cookies. Add containers for accounts you may need with all the major adtech companies. I have Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Reddit containers, as well as one for work which is signed in to all my company accounts. They're fantastic.

If you want to understand more about browser fingerprinting, Cover Your Tracks is a really cool tool from the EFF. It tests your browser to see if it can be uniquely identified. You'll probably find that no matter what you do, your browser sends enough identifying information to be fingerprinted. This is the case even for a brand-new, vanilla browser install, mostly due to canvas fingerprinting. There isn't much you can do about this short of using Tor (and Tor itself is identifiable as Tor, which causes other issues) or other tools/techniques that make your user experience worse.

If you use the modern web, you are being tracked. It's a fact of life.

The best way to avoid giving up your data isn't to install extensions. Those can only give you a false sense of security, and security theater is worse than insecurity. The best way to avoid being tracked on the web is to be on the right side of the web. No amount of blocking helps when the websites you visit and the browsers you use are cooperating to track you. Find the websites that aren't. Browse Mastodon or another ActivityPub network. Put your blog or portfolio or resume on your own domain. Check out neocities. Self-host Nextcloud on an old laptop and invite all your friends to use it. Install Firefox and Linux and pirate all your media. Hack your shit, hardware and software, just because you fucking can. Take charge of your browsing and you will take charge of your data.

Always remember that the web is what it is because of open standards and free information. We own the web. Not Google or Facebook or the feds. We built it, programmers and nerds and posters, weirdos, friends from far away and you. People make the content, the product we consume. Own what you consume. Instagram, Reddit, and Tumblr are package delivery services which control the flow of information. They're trying to convince you that means it's theirs. It's not. Anyone can do anything on the internet, but we have to fight to keep it that way. Being a digital citizen is just like being any other kind of citizen: you have to participate or you will lose the right to.

The web is the most complicated and beautiful network humans have ever built, and it can only be that way because we built it together. Don't let them take away what we made, or worse, convince you we never made it at all.

hello google chrome refugees

don't use any of these browsers, they're also chrome

Here are my favorite firefox plugins for security/anti-tracking/anti-ad that I recommend you get

please get off chrome google is currently being investigated for being an Illegal Monopoly so get outta there okay love you bye

[mniethan]

i haven’t used this app in a VERY long time, trying to get away from Twitter and instagram and go back to where shit made sense. Like this and Google+.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Google antitrust remedy should extinguish surveillance, not democratize it

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

If you are even slightly plugged into the doings and goings on in this tired old world of ours, then you have heard that Google has lost its antitrust case against the DOJ Antitrust Division, and is now an official, no-foolin', convicted monopolist.

This is huge. Epochal. The DOJ, under the leadership of the fire-breathing trustbuster Jonathan Kanter, has done something that was inconceivable four years ago when he was appointed. On Kanter's first day on the job as head of the Antitrust Division, he addressed his gathered prosecutors and asked them to raise their hands if they'd never lost a case.

It was a canny trap. As the proud, victorious DOJ lawyers thrust their arms into the air, Kanter quoted James Comey, who did the same thing on his first day on the job as DA for the Southern District of New York: "You people are the chickenshit club." A federal prosecutor who never loses a case is a prosecutor who only goes after easy targets, and leave the worst offenders (who can mount a serious defense) unscathed.

Under Kanter, the Antitrust Division has been anything but a Chickenshit Club. They've gone after the biggest game, the hardest targets, and with Google, they bagged the hardest target of all.

Again: this is huge:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-judge-rules-google-is-a-monopolist

But also: this is just the start.

Now that Google is convicted, the court needs to decide what to do about it. Courts have lots of leeway when it comes to addressing a finding of lawbreaking. They can impose "conduct remedies" ("don't do that anymore"). These are generally considered weaksauce, because they're hard to administer. When you tell a company like Google to stop doing something, you need to expend a lot of energy to make sure they're following orders. Conduct remedies are as much a punishment for the government (which has to spend millions closely observing the company to ensure compliance) as they are for the firms involved.

But the court could also order Google to stop doing certain things. For example, since the ruling finds that Google illegally maintained its monopoly by paying other entities – Apple, Mozilla, Samsung, AT&T, etc – to be the default search, the court could order them to stop doing that. At the very least, that's a lot easier to monitor.

The big guns, though are the structural remedies. The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/25/structural-separation/#america-act

All of these things, and more, are on the table:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-monopoly-judge-amit-mehta-options/

We'll get a better sense of what the judge is likely to order in the fall, but the case could drag out for quite some time, as Google appeals the verdict, then tries for the Supreme Court, then appeals the remedy, and so on and so on. Dragging things out in the hopes of running out the clock is a time-honored tradition in tech antitrust. IBM dragged out its antitrust appeals for 12 years, from 1970 to 1982 (they called it "Antitrust's Vietnam"). This is an expensive gambit: IBM outspent the entire DOJ Antitrust Division for 12 consecutive years, hiring more lawyers to fight the DOJ than the DOJ employed to run all of its antitrust enforcement, nationwide. But it worked. IBM hung in there until Reagan got elected and ordered his AG to drop the case.

This is the same trick Microsoft pulled in the nineties. The case went to trial in 1998, and Microsoft lost in 1999. They appealed, and dragged out the proceedings until GW Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and dropped the case in 2001.

I am 100% certain that there are lawyers at Google thinking about this: "OK, say we put a few hundred million behind Trump-affiliated PACs, wait until he's president, have a little meeting with Attorney General Andrew Tate, and convince him to drop the case. Worked for IBM, worked for Microsoft, it'll work for us. And it'll be a bargain."

That's one way things could go wrong, but it's hardly the only way. In his ruling, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ's argument that in illegally creating and maintaining its monopoly, Google harmed its users' privacy by foreclosing on the possibility of a rival that didn't rely on commercial surveillance.

The judge repeats some of the most cherished and absurd canards of the marketing industry, like the idea that people actually like advertisements, provided that they're relevant, so spying on people is actually doing them a favor by making it easier to target the right ads to them.

First of all, this is just obvious self-serving rubbish that the advertising industry has been repeating since the days when it was waging a massive campaign against the TV remote on the grounds that people would "steal" TV by changing the channel when the ads came on. If "relevant" advertising was so great, then no one would reach for the remote – or better still, they'd change the channel when the show came back on, looking for more ads. People don't like advertising. And they hate "relevant" advertising that targets their private behaviors and views. They find it creepy.

Remember when Apple offered users a one-click opt-out from Facebook spying, the most sophisticated commercial surveillance system in human history, whose entire purpose was to deliver "relevant" advertising? More than 96% of Apple's customers opted out of surveillance. Even the most Hayek-pilled economist has to admit that this is a a hell of a "revealed preference." People don't want "relevant" advertising. Period.

The judge's credulous repetition of this obvious nonsense is doubly disturbing in light of the nature of the monopoly charge against Google – that the company had monopolized the advertising market.

Don't get me wrong: Google has monopolized the advertising market. They operate a "full stack" ad-tech shop. By controlling the tools that sellers and buyers use, and the marketplace where they use them, Google steals billions from advertisers and publishers. And that's before you factor in Jedi Blue, the illegal collusive arrangement the company has with Facebook, by which they carved up the market to increase their profits, gouge advertisers, starve publishers, and keep out smaller rivals:

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

One effect of Google's monopoly power is a global privacy crisis. In regions with strong privacy laws (like the EU), Google uses flags of convenience (looking at you, Ireland) to break the law with impunity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

In the rest of the world, Google works with other members of the surveillance cartel to prevent the passage of privacy laws. That's why the USA hasn't had a new federal privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling newspaper reporters about the VHS cassettes you took home:

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

The lack of privacy law and privacy enforcement means that Google can inflict untold privacy harms on billions of people around the world. Everything we do, everywhere we go online and offline, every relationship we have, everything we buy and say and do – it's all collected and stored and mined and used against us. The immediate harm here is the haunting sense that you are always under observation, a violation of your fundamental human rights that prevents you from ever being your authentic self:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/14/nsa-prism

The harms of surveillance aren't merely spiritual and psychological – they're material and immediate. The commercial surveillance industry provides the raw feedstock for a parade of horribles, from stalkers and bounty hunters turning up on their targets' front doors to cops rounding up demonstrators with location data from their phones to identity thieves tricking their marks by using leaked or purchased private information as convincers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

The problem with Google's monopolization of the surveillance business model is that they're spying on us. But for a certain kind of competition wonk, the problem is that Google is monopolizing the violation of our human rights, and we need to use competition law to "democratize" commercial surveillance.

This is deeply perverse, but it represents a central split in competition theory. Some trustbusters fetishize competition for its own sake, on the theory that it makes companies better and more efficient. But there are some things we don't want companies to be better at, like violating our human rights. We want to ban human rights violations, not improve them.

For other trustbusters – like me – the point of competition enforcement isn't merely to make companies offer better products, it's to make companies small enough to hold account through the enforcement of democratic laws. I want to break – and break up – Google because I want to end its ability to bigfoot privacy law so that we can finally root out the cancer of commercial surveillance. I don't want to make Google smaller so that other surveillance companies can get in on the game.

There is a real danger that this could emerge from this decision, and that's a danger we need to guard against. Last month, Google shocked the technical world by announcing that it would not follow through on its years-long promise to kill third-party cookies, one of the most pernicious and dangerous tools of commercial surveillance. The reason for this volte-face appears to be concern that the EU would view killing third-party cookies as anticompetitive, since Google intended to maintain commercial surveillance using its Orwellian "Privacy Sandbox" technology in Chrome, with the effect that everyone except Google would find it harder to spy on us as we used the internet:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/googles-trail-of-crumbs

It's true! This is anticompetitive. But the answer isn't to preserve the universal power of tech companies large and small to violate our human rights – it's to ban everyone, especially Google, from spying on us!

This current in competition law is still on the fringe, but the Google case – which finds the company illegally dominating surveillance advertising, but rejects the idea that surveillance is itself a harm – offers an opportunity for this bad idea to go from the fringe to the center.

If that happens, look out.

Take "attribution," an obscure bit of ad-tech jargon disguising a jaw-droppingly terrible practice. "Attribution" is when an ad-tech company shows you an ad, and then follows you everywhere you go, monitoring everything you do, to determine whether the ad convinced you to buy something. I mean that literally: they're combining location data generated by your phone and captured by Bluetooth and wifi receivers with data from your credit card to follow you everywhere and log everything, so that they can prove to a merchant that you bought something.

This is unspeakably grotesque. It should be illegal. In many parts of the world, it is illegal, but it is so lucrative that monopolists like Google can buy off the enforcers and get away with it. What's more, only the very largest corporations have the resources to surveil you so closely and invasively that they can perform this "service."

But again, some competition wonks look at this situation and say, "Well, that's not right, we need to make sure that everyone can do attribution." This was a (completely mad) premise in the (otherwise very good) 2020 Competition and Markets Authority market-study on "Online platforms and digital advertising":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fa557668fa8f5788db46efc/Final_report_Digital_ALT_TEXT.pdf

This (again, otherwise sensible) document veers completely off the rails whenever the subject of attribution comes up. At one point, the authors propose that the law should allow corporations to spy on people who opt out of commercial surveillance, provided that this spying is undertaken for the sole purpose of attribution.

But it gets even worse: by the end of the document, the authors propose a "user ID intervention" to give every Briton a permanent, government-issued advertising identifier to make it easier for smaller companies to do attribution.

Look, I understand why advertisers like attribution and are willing to preferentially take their business to companies that can perform it. But the fact that merchants want to be able to peer into every corner of our lives to figure out how well their ads are performing is no basis for permitting them to do so – much less intervening in the market to make it even easier so more commercial snoops can get their noses in our business!

This is an idea that keeps popping up, like in this editorial by a UK lawyer, where he proposes fixing "Google's dominance of online advertising" by making it possible for everyone to track us using the commercial surveillance identifiers created and monopolized by the ad-tech duopoly and the mobile tech duopoly:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Those companies are doing something rotten. In dominating ads, they have stolen billions from publishers and advertisers. Then they used those billions to capture our democratic process and ensure that our human rights weren't being defended as they plundered our private data and put us in harm's way.

Advertising will adapt. The marketing bros know this is coming. They're already discussing how to live in a world where you can't measure clicks and you can't attribute actions (e.g. the world from the first advertisements up until the early 2000s):

https://sparktoro.com/blog/attribution-is-dying-clicks-are-dying-marketing-is-going-back-to-the-20th-century/

An equitable solution to Google's monopoly will not run though our right to privacy. We don't solve the Google monopoly by creating competition in surveillance. The reason to get rid of Google's monopoly is to make it easier to end surveillance.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[ms-demeanor]

When nobody else has got me I know the EFF has got me:

Even if a court concludes that a model is a derivative work under copyright law, creating the model is likely a lawful fair use. Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works.

- How we think about Copyright and AI Art

A model is a collection of information about what has been expressed, specifically what patterns emerge when many works are compared. To the extent training the model requires reproducing copyrightable expression, that copying has a different purpose and message than the creative works being analyzed to generate these observations. And, as Google v. Oracle teaches, a use that facilitates the creation of new works is more likely to be fair. As in Google, a model can be used for a range of expression informed by user prompts, conveying messages devised by users.

- Comments of EFF to Copyright Office re Generative AI - 2023

[secretlyavastavatar]

Uhhh potential? Maybe?? The desire? HELL no. I just wanna write my stories and not get people eaten by the void of space. And maybe make people who look at my Google search history concerned (mostly looking up writing and/or drawing references).

look away

[astonmartinii]

babysitter duty | max verstappen social media au

pairing: max verstappen x reader

an emergency meeting at red bull means max finally meets the horner family babysitter and chaos ensues

note: i will obviously not be using christian's real kids in this, this is a work of fiction. there will be no real pictures of his kids, neither will i use their real names (i actually have no clue what they are and cannot be bothered to google it lol)

yourusername added to their story

[caption: when all the big businessmen crash baking night]

yourusername

liked by yourbff and others

tagged: yourbff

yourusername: last weekend before the eff won starts again i.e. my last weekend before my only friends are literal children

view all 27 comments

yourbff bring the kids out me thinks

yourusername my boss literally follows this account dumbass

christianhorner do not take my children clubbing

yourusername YES SIR 🫡

yourusername

liked by maxverstappen1, christianhorner and 223 others

yourusername: wasn't raining in oxford for once so a picnic was only necessary

view all 10 comments

yourbff they're so so precious

christianhorner who taught her that sign?

yourusername you did??? stop swearing so much in drive to survive sir

maxverstappen1 she's not wrong

christianhorner why are you here?

maxverstappen1

liked by danielricciardo, yourusername and 601,778 others

maxverstappen1 best way to start the season and to end a ten year drought in Bahrain!! thank you to everyone in the garage and all the fans in the stands

view all 10,865 comments

yourusername smashed it maxy

maxverstappen1 why thank you i'm blushing

user67 what. the. fuck. is that ^^^

themaxverstappenstan33 i am actually bamboozled

danielricciardo ignoring whatever meltdown is happening in these comments - congrats max !!

yourusername added to their story

[caption: school run days]

maxverstappen1 added to their story

f1wagsupdates

liked by f1girly77, likedbypierre and 77 others

f1wagsupdates this is y/n y/ln, she's a live-in babysitter for christian horner and more recently, she seems to be the one catching max verstappen's attention. as far as we know they first met after the top officials at red bull met for an emergency meeting at christian horner's home - we know she was present because she posted on her story with one of the kids baking during the meeting. since then she has been commenting on his posts and max posted a picture of him with a girl on his story in an outfit y/n has posted in before. do you think they're cute?

view all 21 comments

yourusername someone fancies themselves a detective

user34 oof she gagged yall

hugsforcharles tbf she has a point, you guys are digging way too into all of it

lilacverstappen i know this is a gross invasion of privacy but i kinda think they're cute

user33 you're not wrong

maxverstappen1

liked by yourusername, pierregasly and 1,206,781 others

tagged: yourusername

maxverstappen1 fuck u sherlock holmes i'll decide when i announce my relationship ... anyhow, you're cute, sorry christian but you're going to have to find a new babysitter

view all 23,089 comments

yourusername I LOVE YOU MAXY but i love those kids more so looks like you're movign to oxford

maxverstappen1 i never agreed to that

yourusername say goodbye to the tax free life and say hello to crayons and picnics

christianhorner you'll have three very angry kids to deal with max, but aside from that, i'm very happy for the both of you

yourusername love you bossman

maxverstappen1 love you bossman

danielricciardo this is not usually how this plot line ends

landonorris STOP RIGHT THERE OLD MAN THIS IS A WHOLESOME POST

yourusername

liked by maxverstappen1, christianhorner and 22,301 others

tagged: maxverstappen1

yourusername add max moving into christian's house to ur f1 bingo cards - you can't take me away from these kids, they're kinda my only friends

view all 3,451 comments

maxverstappen1 i've been here one day and i'm convinced @christianhorner ur kids are evil geniuses

yourusername obvs they are maxy, they're salty spice's kids

user46 omg she calls him salty spice as well

christianhorner don't make me regret giving you a room near mine

yourusername GET YOUR MIND OUT OF THE GUTTER CHRISTIAN... maybe invest in some ear plugs ;)

christianhorner consider this your eviction notice

note: bit of a random one lol but i had fun. i know people don't like christian (for good reason) but he's the one it worked with. ALSO my asks are open now !!! so ask away xx

[matan4il]

I have a query and I'm sorry that this question is going to upset you in advance. I see a post circling on here about Holocaust survivors apparently saying that Palestinians are exactly like them during attacks on Gaza. I just scroll past it because I have poor attention span that cannot stay focused more than one sentence but I wanted to know your opinion on this post or if you have seen it. Again, deep apologies that this ask is upsetting. Thank you for still being here and sharing with us.

Hi Nonnie!

Thank you for the kind way you approached this.

I have seen a post that might be the one you're referring to... It's a screenshot of a tweet:

The original tweet shows an interview with one Holocaust survivor. The response falsely expands this to survivors, in the plural, as if this one tweet shows a whole movement of Holocaust survivors, that people simply refuse to listen to.

The original tweet comes from an account that calls itself a "media company," but has no website (something I would expect from an actual media company), and is at least 80% tweets that are anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. I'll give you an example. We all know Elon Musk has allowed antisemitism to thrive on Twitter, all kinds of it, including the white supremacist type, and others that have nothing to do with Israel. In an attempt to educate him, he was invited to a tour of Auschwitz. But apparently, according to this "media company," that was just meant to stop anti-genocide speech on his social media platform:

Of the up to 20% of tweets this "media company" posts or shares, many are anti-democratic or in support of dictatorial regimes.

This account also amplified the words of Julius Malema, leader of the South African EFF party, as he justified the Oct 7 massacre, and demanded support for the (genocidal) Hamas and its "resistance."

Malema himself has repeatedly sang, "Kill the Boer," a song which many understand as a genocidal chant against the Boers, the South Africans of Dutch descent. This guy is a controversial figure at best, doesn't seem to have an issue with an actual genocide, and this "media company" upholds his words as if he is a role model.

But if this account tweets Israel hate, then I guess the Tumblr user who passed the tweet along has no issue with how questionable of a source this is.

I recognized the face of the survivor. This is what it looks like in the cut off screenshot in the Tumblr post I saw:

So how did I recognize him? Because the number of anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors is SO small (around 5), and I have seen every single one of them repeatedly tokenized by antisemites so much, that I'm familiar with the name and face of each. The man in this vid is Hajo Meyer, who died in 2014. He couldn't possibly make any comments about Hamas' massacre on Oct 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza since, unless this "media company" has managed to somehow contact the afterlife. Here's a screenshot from Google, showing a recent re-upload of this vid to IG:

And here's a very brief bio, mentioning his date of death:

I'm guessing that "media company" didn't name him, or specify the date out of the vid, because it didn't want people to know the guy was dead, and the views he expressed were pre-Hamas' massacre.

Hajo Meyer was, without a doubt, an anti-Zionist. But would he still be using this rhetoric after Oct 7, after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, after better understanding the kind of threat that Israel and Jews worldwide (since Hamas has tried to target Jews in European countries as well, including in the Netherlands, where Meyer lived) are facing from this genocidal terrorist organization ruling Gaza? IDK. I'd like to think he would be better than to continue distorting the Holocaust through this false comparison, but I can't say for sure, and I'm not about to claim that I do, putting words in his mouth just to exploit a dead Holocaust survivor. The fact that the anti-Israel crowd would continue to tokenize (meaning, exploit) a dead survivor like that, as if anyone could know for sure that Meyer would continue to toe the same line, just shows there really is no moral low they can't stoop to.

And here I wanna emphasize how wrong this antisemitic practice is, tokenizing Jews. Because no marginalized group is immune to the hatred spread against it, there will ALWAYS be some of its members, who will internalize and embrace poison aimed at it. There were gay Nazis (the notorious Ernest Roehm was the highest ranking one) and we also have contemporary gay neo-Nazis. So, should we use them in order to pretend that Nazi ideology is not homophobic? That it didn't harm hundreds of thousands of gay people? No, we know that the overwhelming majority of gay people suffered due to it, and would insist that Nazism IS homophobic. So, using those few exceptions to ignore (and embolden) the homophbia of this ideology, ends up being homophobic in itself. Embracing the unrepresentative few over the representative, mainstream majority of a marginalized group in "exonerating" what the group says is hateful and harmful towards it, ends up being hateful and harmful in itself.

And that's what people who only listen to the few anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors are doing. They're basically saying, "Listen to Holocaust survivors!" but they mean only the few who say what the anti-Israel movement does. All the other survivors they ignore, dismiss, silence or even erase.

They're ignoring the voices of the overwhelming majority of Holocaust survivors who WERE (and are) Zionist. Who do not agree with this distorted narrative. Yad Vashem estimates that two thirds of Holocaust survivors came to Israel at the end of WWII, and many more supported Israel even when they chose to settle elsewhere. Just recently, we had a group of 870 American survivors (along with their descendants, altogether 2,500 Jews) thank Biden for standing with Israel after the Hamas massacre. These anti-Israel haters are also erasing the survivors who were themselves targeted on Oct 7, whether threatened, kidnapped, injured or murdered (I've talked about several in my posts on this blog). This anti-Israel mob is exploiting Hajo Meyer even in ignoring that if he had been alive and present in Israel, even just to visit a friend or family member, he would have been targeted, too. These haters are ignoring survivors who said that what Hamas has done is similar to what the Nazis did (I've talked about several of them in my posts on this blog, too. All can be found in my Israel tag).

It is unconscionable, to treat most Holocaust survivors like they don't count, and only see a (literal) handful of anti-Zionist ones as if they do. And it certainly does NOT show the respect the anti-Israel haters imply survivors are owed, through the demand that we all defer to the opinion of the survivors, but ONLY the few anti-Zionist ones.

All that said, off the top of my head, here's a small number of HUGE differences between the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, and anyone ignoring them IS guilty of distorting the Holocaust.

-> The Holocaust did NOT start due to Jews repeatedly murdering Germans on German soil, in an attempt to keep Germans down and prevent them from establishing self rule in the German ancestral land. The Holocaust was completely unprovoked, unjustified and one-sided. Every oppressive measure taken by the Nazis against the Jews, was motivated by antisemitism, and was NOT a reaction to Jewish anti-German terrorism, that the Nazis had to protect their German citizens from. Speaking of unprovoked, unjustified and for a very long time one-sided, that describes the Arab anti-Jewish violence that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel by almost 100 years. But Jewish self-defense in this conflict, which only started about 50 years after said violence began, was provoked, was justified, was a response to what was done to the Jews first.

-> The Holocaust did NOT consist of Jews on German soil collaborating militarily with several Jewish countries surrounding Germany, with the goal of these combined Jewish armies invading and wiping it off the map, in order to prevent German self rule. Guess what the Arabs did to the Jews...

-> The Holocaust did NOT entail repeated German efforts to find a solution for how Jews and Germans could live together on the same land. In pre-state Israel, Jews did try repeatedly to reach an understanding that would allow Jews and Arabs to peacefully share (and co-exist in) the Jewish ancestral land.

-> When Jews finally started rebelling against the Nazis, they did NOT try to get as many Jewish civilians as possible killed. On the contrary, the outbreak of the most famous Jewish revolt, the one in the Warsaw Ghetto, was postponed until the Nazis entered, and the Jewish fighters believed this to be the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto (meaning, the deportation and extermination of the roughly 60,000 Jews still alive there). Only then did they fight back, because (in their own words), they did not want their decision to rebel to cost another Jew "even one hour of life." Compare that to how Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Or even to the Arab leadership back in 1948, which did not hesitate in risking or displacing the entire Arab population in the Land of Israel, in favor of fighting what they called "an extermination war" against the Jews.

-> The Holocaust did NOT see a single day where Germans worked en masse to try and alleviate the suffering of Jews, whether by providing them with humanitarian aid, or by moving them to areas where they would be safe from death. That's in direct contrast to Israel's efforts to make Palestinians' lives better, whether through humanitarian aid, work permits in Israel that guarantee a higher salary and better social rights, medical treatments, warnings when a terrorist target is about to be struck, etc.

-> The Holocaust was NOT supposed to end with even one Jew alive at the end of it. The Germans were going for total extermination of the Jewish people. All Jews who had German citizens were stripped of it in 1935, even before the most murderous parts of this genocide commenced. In contrast, Israel did NOT seek to kill all Arabs, there were many calls for Arabs not to flee Israel and the war which the Arab leadership had started, at the end of the war Israel gave citizenship to 150,000 Arabs who did not leave and did not take arms against Jews, and there was even an offer for tens of thousands of Arabs to return (Weitzmann presented it to the UN), if they do so peacefully. Just a few thousands accepted that offer, but those who did, got citizenship and land.

-> The Nazis were so eager to kill every Jew, that they came to the conclusion they HAD to industrialize their genocide of the Jewish people. That's why they built extermination camps with gas chambers at their core. Auschwitz alone could, on certain days, kill about 20,000 people. No Jew was meant to leave those camps alive. The crematoria were mass murder factories. ANY crime that you want to compare to the Holocaust specifically, you have to show that it includes this industrialization element. Currently, NO GENOCIDE, no matter how horrific, has. And God help us all, I hope it stays that way (this is one of the reasons why the Holocaust mustn't be distorted or minimized. We can't prevent something from happening, if we don't understand what HAS happened, and that we're trying to stop from being repeated). There is not a SINGLE thing in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict that comes CLOSE to being an industrialized form of massacre. Even the brutality of Hamas on Oct 7, the single bloodiest day in the history of this conflict for either side, doesn't come close.

-> While there are still Jews around, meaning the Holocaust as conceptualized by the Nazis failed, it was so deadly, that it DID lead to the murder of around 70-80% of the Jews living under the Nazi occupation over a short number of years. Even more than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jews have not recovered demographically. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population has increased by about 10 times since Israel's Independence War. But let's say people wanna claim that just this current war is comparable to the Holocaust. There are presently around 7 million Arabs in the territories of the Jewish ancestral land, of which about 2 million are Israeli citizens. I'm gonna go with the anti-Israel narrative for a second, which claims ALL of them are occupied and oppressed by Israel (even though they're not). In order for the ruin of Palestinians to be indeed on the same level, that would mean 70-80% of them would have to be murdered by Israel during the war. Let's go with the lower percent, so it's easier for the anti-Israel crowd to reach the number of deaths that would support their claim. To have killed 70% of 7 million, that would mean Israel would have to kill 4.9 million Arabs in this so-called "genocide." Even if we exclude Israeli Arabs, and only focus on the 5 million Palestinians living in areas where the Israeli army currently operates (imagine the German Nazis allowing Jews safety inside Germany, and only killing them outside it *eyeroll*), that would mean at least 3.5 million Palestinians killed. But after almost 5 months of this war, the number of Palestinian fatalities, as claimed by Hamas, is around 30,000 people (I'm putting aside the fact that at least 12,000 are Hamas terrorists). The gap between what is happening, and what people who make this false comparison are implying is happening, is incomprehensible.

Sorry for the length, but I hope this is helpful!

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[probablyasocialecologist]

YouTube says it will intentionally cripple the playback of its videos in third-party apps that block its ads. A Monday post in YouTube's help forum notes netizens using applications that strip out adverts while streaming YouTube videos may encounter playback issues due to buffering or error messages indicating that the content is not available. "We want to emphasize that our terms don’t allow third-party apps to turn off ads because that prevents the creator from being rewarded for viewership, and Ads on YouTube help support creators and let billions of people around the world use the streaming service," said a YouTube team member identified as Rob. "We also understand that some people prefer an entirely ad-free experience, which is why we offer YouTube Premium." This crackdown is coming at the API level, as these outside apps use this interface to access the Google-owned giant's videos. Last year, YouTube acknowledged it was running scripts to detect ad-blocking extensions in web browsers, which ended up interfering with Firefox page loads and prompted a privacy complaint to Ireland's Data Protection Commission. And several months before that, the internet video titan experimented with popup notifications warning YouTube web visitors that ad-blocking software is not allowed. A survey published last month by Ghostery, a maker of software that promotes privacy by blocking ads and tracking scripts, found that Google's efforts to crack down on ad blocking made about half of respondents (49 percent) more willing to use an ad blocker. According to the survey, the majority of Americans now use advert blockers, something recommended by the FBI when conducting internet searches.

Download NewPipe, it's what I use on Android

[murfpersonalblog]

IWTV S2 Ep1 Musings - Daciana: History through Visual Context in Ploiești, Romania

I immediately fell in love with The Vampire Daciana & her Romanian castle, and wanted to know more about it all.

We already know how much the set/costume designers on IWTV looooove attention to detail; they tell whole stories just through architecture, furniture, clothes, etc. So I was like OK, AMC, I see you; lemme start doing some reading up on Romania, so I can try to figure out what might be going on with Daciana. (Warning: I know eff all about Romania or Eastern Europe.)

ROMANIA

Map of Romania. Ploiești's the dot just under Muntenia, north of Bucharest, the capital. Ploiești's part of Wallachia, the IRL kingdom of Vlad Tepes (aka Dracula). Louis & Claudia went there in the 1940s, so I hope this map is accurate enough. (There's this map, but I dunno the date.)

DACIANA

The most obvious thing about her is that she's not dressed in the typical traditional Romanian folk clothing I see all over Google, full of white-red-blue/black palettes.

Daciana's not following traditional 19th/20th-century Romanian nationalist images. Her green/brown palette & silhouette is telling, as she lacks the puffy white blouses & dark skirts. (Despite her name, I'm ruling out her being Dacian (X X)--you think you're FUNNY, AMC! But IDK about Cezare Romulo (X X); might do a Pt2!)

Sleeves

First thing's her trailing slashed open sleeves, which were screaming Medieval! at me. Here's some 15th century Renaissance examples, but with surcoats, which is different, but the sleeves reminded me of hers so IDFK.

We could chalk this up to Daciana's design as just generic "medieval" fairytale stuff and keep it moving. But to give her a fair shake, I looked at local examples for anything similar that's more recent.

Traditional clothing from Huedin, Romania (north Transylvania), (X X).

Traditional clothing from Cluj, Romania (north Transylvania).

Keep Transylvanian/Muntenian cross-cultural contacts in mind when we get to Daciana's castle, cuz it's important!

Wrt rarer non-puffy sleeves, the square cut (light blue) seems to be more prevalent in Wallachia/Moldavia/Bessarabia (southern & eastern Romania); while the rectangular cut (dark green) is all over Romania, but definitely has a concentration in Wallachia & Moldavia.

And this makes sense, cuz the style seems to also be prevalent in 19th - 20th century Bulgaria, just south of Wallachia. Hrm....

Daciana's sleeves hang very long--the only example of super long sleeves I could find is a 19th century one at the Met (C.I.47.3.4a–d). The only example of slashed sleeves I could find is in this museum exhibit at Bran Castle (yes, THE Bran Castle--I'll get to it in a minute!)

Belt, Bodice, & Fabric

Daciana's belt is so plain compared to everything else. Is it supposed to be a leather Romanian chimir (worn by mountain/forest folk)? Those are only worn by men though? Or it depends? Or is it a just a plain cloth belt? It's reminding me of these examples (X X):

I wish I could see more of Daciana's bodice, if there's any particular kind of cut or patterns. Is the diamond netted/knotted/roped pattern on her arms significant? Her fabric is interesting, too:

What's this embroidery? Brocade? (Byzantine-Renaissance?) Damask? (c. 14th-16th century?) Lace? Something else? My brain wants to assume it's imported? Meaning: she's hella rich. Cuz like, the traditional Romanian blouse & skirt used to belong solely to peasants, b4 19th-20th century aristocrats started wearing it, too.

IDKY--more reading led me to a whole bunch of complicated stuff, that can probably be simplified by just saying: The Ottomans. XD

The pre-19th century Romanian aristocracy wore super opulent clothes, inspired by not just the Ottomans (X), but also the Byzantine Greeks (via 18th century Romanian Phanariote boyars (X X X)), etc. But aside from the hanging sleeves, Daciana's dress doesn't really resemble any of these foreign examples. However, it does track with my theory that Daciana predates the 19th-century Romanian nationalist/traditional clothes that became so iconic later on.

Like Louis & Claudia did, let's follow Daciana to her castle! ^0^

DACIANA'S CASTLE

I NEED to know if AMC filmed on location in Romania, or if Daciana's castle is just a studio set/green screen.

The interior's nowhere near what I expected, considering Daciana's haggard appearance. It's really nice--clean & tidy. No spiderwebs, no chipped plaster/paint, not even any bloodstains--but I've mentioned before that I think it's indicating that Daciana's a mother who takes better care of her home (and "child") than herself.

Archway

The first thing is the arch when they first come in (noticeable mostly cuz of how Louis had to bend down to get in, he's so tall).

These types of doors/arches are called "shouldered arches," dating from the Medieval-Gothic periods, which Europeans adapted from Islamic architecture during the medieval Crusades. (Examples inc. Lainici Monastery in Wallachia, and the Academy of Art in Cluj-Napoca (north Transylvania).)

The left pic's Biertan Fortified Church, in Sibiu (south Transylvania). (Another door.) The right pic's Bran Castle, in Brasov (south Transylvania). (Another door.) (Vlad Tepes/Dracula historically never owned this castle, but pop culture says otherwise.) Both places were built by the German/Saxon Transylvanians in the 14th-16th centuries; which might help date Daciana's castle, if not Daciana herself? (The Saxon Transylvanians were in Wallachia, too.)

Wall Ornamentation

The last thing I'll discuss is the wall ornamentation/decoration:

The painted floral trim everywhere instantly reminded me of The Witcher 3, as found in Hungarian, Polish, Ukranian etc buildings. Apparently the designs are all related to fertility, growth/luck, and the Tree of Life. Walls (X X X) and doors (X X) were painted. You can see northern Romanian painted ornamentation in Suceava (Bukovina).

There's painted wall designs in southern Romania, too.

"The research of the popular interior in the Argeş and Muscel areas leads to the determination, along with a local specificity, and some Transylvanian influences, in the contact areas between southern Transylvania and northern Muntenia. In the researched areas, two lines of development of the popular interior can be observed, one relatively simple and the other complex. If the first is the prerogative of a typical Subcarpathian interior, the second represents a distinctly Transylvanian form, which was also imposed due to the presence of the Transylvanian population in the south of the Carpathians, settled in numerous villages." -- (Google Translated from Arta populară din zonele Argeș și Muscel, 1967)

(The website RomaniaDacia has A LOT to say about Transylvania, and the impact of the Germans, Saxons, Hungarians, etc on Wallachia & the rest of Romania.)

Sure enough, I was finding way more carved ornamentation (X X X X X X) than painted ones.

But I wonder if that's why a lot of southern traditional Romanian interiors I've been finding have totally plain whitewashed walls, too, with no painted ornaments, just tapestries (X X). I did find Romanian interior floral wall painted trims (X), but not nearly as much.

Cuz actually, the closest comparanda I was finding for Daciana was Northern European rosemaling (X X), which is also giving me medieval vibes (X); specifically: trims on illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Hours (X X X)--which we know from Lestat in S01E06.

And we do see some Romanian medieval fresco borders & frescoes that had been plastered over & whitewashed, in Biertan's 15th century churches, and in 13th-15th century Darjiu (Transylvania).

So, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Romanian buildings (especially castles with whitewashed plastered walls) were formerly painted similar to Daciana's. Unfortunately, I just can't find an example or figure out what AMC might've been inspired by--Romania has hundreds of castles & churches.

So, I'm tapping out--this is the most I could find so far. U_U

Results? Inconclusive! 😭 My Google-fu has failed me, LOL!

I still have no idea what time period Daciana could be from. We could go several routes:

Go by her name, and say she's ooooold AF, an actual Dacian. She's just been collating Eastern European culture as she ages, but stopped at some point (as her mind deteriorated)

She's medieval, somewhere roundabouts the 14th-16th century (making her ~500 years old, the same age as Armand--but she's weaker (as I've theorized b4), which is why she was able to burn herself up.)

Settle on her being a local Wallachian from Southern Romania, likely pre-19th century / pre-industrial early-modern Europe

Handwave everything aside as Renn-Faire fairytale fantasy; let the tale seduce you~!

OR, we can just bully AMC until they give us an extended BTS look at how Daciana was conceptualized, telling us all the tea about her! 😈

[dontexpectmuch]

sometimes jude gives himbo vibes (lets never forget he thinking mexican was a language lol) so what about headcanons of himbo jude and smart reader? I think this could be fun 😂😅

jude bellingham testing his partners patience could be like��:

you try your very best to help jude and his friend, gio, as much as you can when it comes to freshen up their general knowledge. you try. however, as soon as you talk about the first topic, a huge discussion erupts with both of them talking as loud as possible, trying to get their points through. and somehow you always end up in the middle, both of them trying to get to tell the other that their opinion is wrong.

“bro, a piranha could kill you.” gio laughs, looking at jude who only shakes his head scoffing with his hand squeezing your thigh. “not me, though.” he denies, now looking at you, in hopes that you would back him up. “don’t look at me like that, love, of course they can.” - “you should support me instead of that geezer!” he exclaims, offended that you would betray him like that. “bro, why wouldn’t it? have you seen them?” gio continued, not believing that his friend could be this naïve. “i’ll just swim away.” jude shrugged. both gio and you looked at him flabbergasted, no words found to describe how disappointed you felt.

explaining him different theories throughout the day, whether it was biology related or historical, became the new norm for you. it almost felt like playing teacher/pupil. jude somehow always comes up with the most interesting (?) questions ever. and instead of googling it or whatever, his first reaction is to go to you, the smartest person he knew. “babe, what did they say about the giraffe necks again?” - “babe, how can genes skip a generation? do they just, i don’t know, wait?” - “bro, what do you mean the proteins dissolve in heat?” you have to be patient, but also couldn’t help but coo at your boyfriends confused expression.

he uses your wide spectrum of vocabulary to roast his teammates or jobe in the group chat, never in real life, since he wouldn’t be able to pronounce everything correctly for the first time. it is usually in the evening, the two of you laying on the couch, a tv show softly playing in the background. “yo,” jude speaks up, his face focused on his phone, eyebrows drawn together and lips agape, “how do i say that he can go fuck himself and that i don’t care that he doesn’t want to do it, but, like, make it sound smart.” - “jude, what are you doing?”

sometimes, when his cluelessness gets too much for you to handle, you usually walk away, to a different room or something. just, something so you wouldn’t hit judes pretty little head with the next slipper you found. though, he is really mature and is able to keep a conversation flowing, he’d sometimes say something so out of pocket that one would have to be left alone for a while, just so you could comprehend what had happened. and jude would follow you, not giving you a chance to escape his weirdness, “bruh, c’mon it wasn’t that bad.” he’d laugh, his hands closed around your arm to pull you against his chest. “no, please.” you shake your head, trying to break free, “i can’t do this today.” -“babe! don’t be so mean.” - “love, what do you mean you thought mexican was a language? please, don’t do this to me.” hearing you say that caused him to laugh even more, eyes closed and head thrown back.

———————————

himbo bee effs for the win