#get wapo free from work

[lazyscience]

it's very interesting what social media sites glom onto what kind of news stories (also, how different circles of the same social media site talk past each other)

at some point we gotta acknowledge that getting the majority of your news and takes and general opinions from tumblr is not meaningfully different than getting it from tiktok even though on here it's in textual form. understanding the world through the lens of viral videos vs understanding it through breathless unsourced text posts written by dykeastarion69

[elfwreck]

(Link goes to the wayback machine, not the paywalled version at WaPo.)

Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form. In the midnight email, which was shared with The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore" going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

Oh look, a free route to unemployment benefits for people who want to leave but didn't get caught in the first purge.

"Plz agree to 10-12 hour days working on my site-changing projects in an increasingly desperate attempt to stop the money bleed. Also, be prepared to cover for the tasks currently being done by people who refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks."

Again: Hey Twitter employees.... IT'S UNION TIME.

[dragodina]

WIP Tag Game Part IV

Thank you @krejong for the tag 😊❤️ !

Not sure if the list is complete but I have way too many WIPs and way to less joy / motivation to currently work on any of them. And with each day we get closer to THAT fateful date of Julias exit it only seems to get worse.

And I'm not sure after Julias Tatort exit if someone will even be interested to read those further stuff. I'm honest I'm not sure if all of this will ever see the light of fanfiction world. Will see I guess. If you would be interested to read it, feel free to pop me a quick like or comment, maybe that will help with further motivation ❤️.

Tatort Hamburg:

- Last Chance (charter 17)

- some scenes for a future alternative version Tatort Hamburg with an OC

- Was bleibt mir von dir (aka When it hurts to remember)

- Was bleibt, ist ein Menschenleben

- Was bleibt / You're my wonderwall

- Was bleibt?

- From Yesterday

- I think you're amazing

- Kominn heim / Tears can sparkle too

- So wie ich

- Only For A Night

- Tatort Folgen Hamburg - Tinia Alternative Version

- Can't escape the ghost of you

- Tinia Idee basierend auf einer Story Time auf Instagram (bisher ohne Titel)

- eine Post Falke AU (die wahrscheinlich auch nie das Licht der Welt erblicken wird)

- Hiraeth

- Pareidolie

- Alles Brennt / Wenn Du Lebst

- Coming Home

- Tatort Idee with Afghanistan theme

- Tatort Idee Julia/Tine/Dresden

Andere Fandoms:

- Wer wir sind (Alternative Version)

- Der Schwarm (Alternative Version)

- Tage die es nicht gab (Alternative Version)

- Wapo Elbe Story (still Untilted)

- Der Pass AUs

Die womöglich alle niemals gepostet werden aber aus meinem Kopf raus mussten 😅.

If you're interested in any of the works already uploaded you can check it out here 😊:

WIP tag game history:

WIP Tag game Part III

WIP Tag game Part II

WIP Tag game Part I

If you're interested and were not already tagged I would love to know about @disappointingsalad @except4bunnies @caromitpunkt @karin-in-action but no pressure at all of course.

Have a lovely start to the weekend and also a wonderful christmas time.

[contentment-of-cats]

Harvard and Facebook Boot Disinformation Scholar, Play in Our Faces about Squeezing Academic Freedom. Scholar Files Suit to Show Harvard's Bare Ass

Text taken from the WaPo below. Saying that a USD$500m pledge has nothing to do with Donovan's dismissal is a weasel-worded lie that insults intelligence. This is why support for FB - even having an account there - is support for this kind of influence buying and academic whoredom. Harvard's endowment is over USD$53b and "a dedicated and permanent source of funding that maintains the teaching and research mission of the University" as per their website.

Article below. Use a paywall breaker. like 12ft.io

~

A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.

Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.

As research director of Harvard Kennedy School projects delving into mis- and disinformation on social media platforms, Donovan had raised millions in grants, testified before Congress and been a frequent commentator on television, often faulting internet companies for profiting from the spread of divisive falsehoods.

Last year, the school’s dean told her that he was winding down her main project and that she should stop fundraising for it. This year, the school eliminated her position. The surprise dismissal alarmed fellow researchers elsewhere, who saw Donovan as a pioneer in an increasingly critical area of great sensitivity to the powerful and well-connected tech giants.

Donovan has remained silent about what happened until now, filing a 248-page legal statement obtained by The Washington Post that traces her problems to her acquisition of a trove of explosive documents known as the Facebook Papers and championing their importance before an audience of Harvard donors that included Facebook’sformer top communications executive.

Harvard disputes Donovan’s core claims, telling The Post that she was a staff employee and that it had not been able to find a faculty sponsor to oversee her work, as university policy requires. It also denies that she was fired, saying she “was offered the chance to continue as a part-time adjunct lecturer, and she chose not to do so.”

Donovan obtained the Facebook documents when they and the former Facebook employee who leaked them, Frances Haugen, were the subject of extensive news coverage in October 2021, with The Post writing that the documents showed Facebook “privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms, ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content.”

Frances Haugen took thousands of Facebook documents: This is how she did it

As the main attraction at a Zoom meeting for top Kennedy School donors on Oct. 29 that year, Donovan said the papers showed that Meta knew the harms it was causing. Formertop Facebook communications executive Elliot Schrage asked repeated questions during the meeting and said she badly misunderstood the papers, Donovan wrote in a sworn declaration included in the filing.

Ten days after the donors meeting, Kennedy School dean Doug Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, emailed Donovan with pointed questions about her research goals and methods, launching an increase in oversight that restricted her activities and led to her dismissal before the end of her contract, according to the declaration. Donovan wrote that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s $500 million gift for a new artificial intelligence institute at the university, announced Dec. 7 that year, had been in the works before the donor meeting.

Leaders at the Kennedy School “were inappropriately influenced by Meta/Facebook,” Donovan claims in her declaration. “A significant conflict of interest arising from funding and personal relationships has created a pervasive culture at HKS of operating in the best interest of Facebook/Meta at the expense of academic freedom and Harvard’s own stated mission.”

The filing raises questions about the potential conflict of interest created by Big Tech’s influence at research institutions that are called upon for their expertise on the industry.

“The document’s allegations of unfair treatment and donor interference are false. The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research,” Kennedy School spokesperson Sofiya Cabalquinto said by email. “By policy and in practice, donors have no influence over this or other work.”

Cabalquinto’s email added: “By long-standing policy to uphold academic standards, all research projects at Harvard Kennedy School need to be led by faculty members. Joan Donovan was hired as a staff member (not a faculty member) to manage a media manipulation project. When the original faculty leader of the project left Harvard, the School tried for some time to identify another faculty member who had time and interest to lead the project. After that effort did not succeed, the project was given more than a year to wind down. Joan Donovan was not fired, and most members of the research team chose to remain at the School in new roles.”

Elmendorf declined to comment.

At one point, Elmendorf told Donovan that she did not have academic freedom because she was staff rather than faculty, she recounts. Officials confirmed that position to The Post.

But Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig said that stance should be limited to traditional staff work, not research papers, other publications and teaching.

“When you’re doing what looks like academic work as one of the most prominent people in an academic field, the university ought to award that person the protections of academic freedom,” said Lessig, an expert on corruption who made inquiries to Harvard’s administration on Donovan’s behalf. “When she was presenting herself to the world, there was no asterisk at the bottom of her name saying, ‘As long as what she says is consistent with the interests of Harvard University.’”

Donovan was recently hired for a tenure-track professorship at Boston University.

The Donovan case comes at a time when researchers who focus on social media platforms find themselves under increasing attack. Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s legal foundation has sued academic and independent researchers, claiming that they conspired with government agencies to suppress speech, and Republican-led congressional committees have subpoenaed their records, adding to the pressure.

In addition, Big Tech companies themselves have sponsored research, made grants to some colleges and universities, and doled out data to professors who agree to specific avenues of inquiry.

The filing asks the federal Education Department’s civil rights division to investigate whether Harvard violated Donovan’s right to free speech and academic freedom. It asks Massachusetts’s charity regulators to examine whether the university deceived donors or misappropriated their funds by retaining millions that Donovan had raised for her research.

A copy sent to Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, asks her to determine whether the Kennedy School had breached the university’s own policies.

“All of the efforts taken to undermine Dr. Donovan came at great costs — to the donors who contributed millions of dollars to her work, and to the public more broadly who every day, all day long, are exposed to disinformation and misinformation,” Whistleblower Aid attorneys Andrew Bakaj and Kyle Gardiner wrote in the filing.

“There are a handful of tried and true means to coerce someone or some entity to do something they would not otherwise do, and influence through financial compensation is at or near the top of the list,” the filing says. “Objectively, $500 million is certainly significant financial influence.”

In addition to Donovan, Whistleblower Aid has represented Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower; former Twitter security chief Peiter Zatko; and anonymous whistleblowers from the intelligence community.

In the documents, Donovan contends that Meta’s influence at Harvard goes beyond money and includes deep personal connections. Schrage, for one, earned degrees from Harvard College, the Kennedy School and Harvard’s law school.

Zuckerberg and Facebook’s former longtime chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, were Harvard undergraduates, as was Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan.

Elmendorf served as Sandberg’s adviser for a club she started in college. They remained close, and Elmendorf attended Sandberg’s wedding in August 2022. Four days later, he told Donovan he was winding down her research team, she says in the complaint.

Kennedy School officials said Elmendorf and Sandberg never discussed Donovan. Schrage and Sandberg declined to comment.

Meta also declined to comment, while the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said it contributed money because it cared about the science. “CZI had no involvement in Dr. Donovan’s departure from Harvard,” spokesperson Jeff MacGregor said.

Donovan says in her complaint that Elmendorf emailed her after the October donors’ meeting and asked to discuss her Facebook work and “focus on a few key issues drawn from the questions raised by the Dean’s Council and my own limited reading of current events.”

He wrote that he wanted to hear from her about “How you define the problem of misinformation for both analysis and possible responses (algorithm-adjusting or policymaking) when there is no independent arbiter of truth (in this country or others) and constitutional protections of speech (in some countries)?”

Donovan said in the filing that Elmendorf’s use of the phrase “arbiters of truth” alarmed her because Facebook uses the same words to explain its reluctance to take actions against false content.

She explained to Elmendorf that rather than making moral judgments about politics or proclaiming that a vaccine is good or bad, she looked for provable manipulation of platforms, as with fake accounts.

“We do not generally speak about what is good or bad for a society, but rather what is true or false about a specific public event,” she emailed him.

Donovan then alerted colleagues with whom she was starting to work on the Facebook Archive of leaked documents that she was drawing heat. Both suggested that they take the name of Donovan’s Technology and Social Change Research Project off the archive project’s website.

“Let’s remove the explicit listing of TASC, minimally, or of all three groups, when the website updates later today,” Kennedy School professor Latanya Sweeney wrote in an email included in Donovan’s filing. “No reason to put a target on the project that allows FB to claim bias before we even do anything.”

Donovan’s project remained listed on the page until this year, according to copies preserved by the internet archive.

Sweeney said her role was twisted by the Donovan filing. “The number and nature of inaccuracies and falsehoods in the document are so abundant and self-serving as to be horribly disappointing,” she told The Post. “Meta exerted no influence over the Facebook Archive or any of our/my work.”

Elmendorf met with Donovan again in August 2022 and told her that her project at the Kennedy School would end in the coming year, the filing says.

Though Donovan’s contract was supposed to keep her on the job through the end of 2024, her superiors took away her ability to start new projects, raise money or organize large events, she alleges. They kept the money she had brought in, including more than $1 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark that he wanted specifically to go to her research project, according to documents quoted in the declaration. Newmark declined to comment.

The Kennedy School said no money was misused. The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said it is reviewing the filing. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

This September, Elmendorf said that the current academic year would be his last as dean and that he would continue to teach.

The Facebook Archive finally went public in October. Far down a page devoted to the history of the site, it says that Sweeney’s Public Interest Tech Lab “received an anonymous drop of the internal Facebook documents” and that “Dr. Joan Donovan immediately recognized the valuable insight the documents provided.”

It does not say Donovan obtained the documents and launched the project, as she contends.

[101now]

Top news stories Google.com usa 12-16-22 101now.con simply FIRE 🔥 news

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[beardedmrbean]

Guess we're against impersonation again guys

I just commented on this one.

Incredible that the good senator from the great state of Massachusetts is upset with musk instead of being upset with the alleged journalists over at WaPo that decided to impersonate him.

And to be fair, he was probably opposed to it from the get go but nobody listens to him so meh.

Honestly though the impersonation thing was easy as hell before anyhow, people are just mad at musk.

As I've said on previous posts, one of the big bonuses of having the owner of the town square be someone so many people loathe is there's going to be a massive uptick in people policing the site on their own.

Which means the glut of illegal activity that happens on there will start to get reined in by people giving their time freely to do it instead of musk needing to pay all those people in content verification/moderation.

Gotta wonder if the tattletales will figure out they're working fro elon musk for free by searching through all that garbage.

Should be funny

[extasiswings]

Hi! Sorry if this is a really dumb question or one you've answered before, but how do you know so much about politics? No one I know looks closer than Fox News or TikTok/Facebook and I legitimately don't know how to learn more. Are there certain websites or journalists that I should look into? Any books you'd recommend for a good overview of American politics? I'm sorry again if this is a dumb question and you don't have to answer if you don't want to!

It’s not a dumb question at all! For me personally, I know a lot because I have worked in politics or politics-adjacent fields for the majority of my adult life (although I also had really good history and government teachers in middle and high school that sparked an interest). I have a graduate degree in public policy and some of my course work was taught by people who at one time held very high offices. I’ve also worked on campaigns for ballot initiatives and similar measures at the state and local level, I’ve drafted legislation and met with legislators and staff to do direct advocacy and lobbying work, I’ve worked for stakeholders in in broad coalitions for different advocacy and activist communities so I’ve been exposed to the nuances of strategy development and coalition building through those types of efforts…basically I have a lot of personal experience and also connections that inform my general knowledge base and perspective on certain topics (like how government works in general but when it comes to a few specific policy areas I can get very in the weeds).

One important question to keep in mind is, what’s your goal? Because the level of investment (even if maybe not the approach) may vary depending on whether you just want to be generally informed or if you have specific policy issues that you’re really invested in and want to follow or if you’re interested in advocacy work or even running for office, etc.

But as far as staying current and informed, I think the first thing to say would be that you absolutely should not be getting your news from social media. I have a love-hate relationship with the beltway media for prioritizing clicks over honest journalism, but if you’re looking for general high-level information about “things happening at the federal level” and aren’t able to commit to a paid subscription, I would look at the AP, CNN, NPR, the Guardian. I have beef with Politico but it’s also an option. If you are willing to invest in a paid subscription to NYT and/or WaPo, I recommend it. (I’m slightly less helpful on this point because these days my initial daily news dump comes from various subscription-based legal news outlets that I have access to through my job). For state and local news, I’d look into newspapers for your region on top of the national outlets because national outlets are simply not going to cover absolutely everything going on in a specific state and especially a city. I would also say in general that it’s important to get your news from a number of different sources so you don’t end up in an echo chamber of, for example, just Fox News or MSNBC, and to be aware of the biases of a particular outlet. There are a lot of free “news” sites on both the far right and far left that exist basically just to further an agenda and spread lies about both Democrats and how government works (the Intercept, my most beloathed). On a similar note, when you do see people sharing articles on social media (or making random outlandish claims), pay attention to what they’re sharing or what sources they’re citing to back up their claims because it’s really easy to spread misinformation and even well-meaning people can do so. Also important to pay attention to the types of articles you’re reading, which may sound obvious but I’ve seen way too many people be like “well I read this in an opinion piece so it must be true” and…no. I have more that I could say that’s specific to candidate and election research but that’s a little bit different.

As far as books…everything I have ever read has just flown out of my head. But I would point you towards @mariacallous and @dhaaruni both of whom are brilliant and have excellent taste in reading materials and might have some recs.

[miscmeanderings]

So what do we do? Good journalism takes more money because good journalism takes more work! Think about it. How long does it take to fart out a click-bait article that's largely made up or basically fed to the writer by someone with an agenda? Or that only interviews a single source? (I'm not so sure about WaPo but NYT at least makes the effort to do it's homework and add context and more sources.)

The sad thing is ad revenue isn't enough anymore to pay for a paper's operations (or at least not whole large enough buffer to keep many of them as profitable as their owners like). There's too much competition of other spaces for eyeballs (attention). So a lot of newspapers are becoming increasingly reliant on subscriptions for money.

(there are exceptions of course - but since this was obviously American-centric like so much on Tumblr, I'm going to leave out the issue of countries where internet penetration is lower so dailies are still doing better. I'll also skip the fact that paywalls are a tiny part of the lack of thoughtful news consumption trend - the impact from the fact that most people get their fucking news from a social media post instead of long form articles is making a much worse impact. I'll skip the fact that some countries don't have a free press so hahahaha enjoy the experience of paying to read the publicly-funded public broad sheet that is STILL PAYWALLED and STILL controlled by the govt and still not even good writing. Looking at you Singapore's The Straits Times.)

There are ways around it - you can try a blend of content (more infotainment) to draw more viewer, boost ad revenue. But that's traditionally not worked very well and I'm not enough of an industry expert to know why :/ my guess is the corporate temptation to just funnel the profits into the money-making side of work to do MORE of that (entertainment) is just tough to fight.

You can go niche and small - but then you're probably not going to have a bandwidth to cover more stories. Also, lower and revenue and smaller subscriber based.

So where CAN the money come from? What could we possibly do if we feel the fourth estate is actually an important public good?

Public funding.

The Brits and the BBC got this right a long time ago. It's not perfect of course and the BBC is getting some blowback for how much it pays popular show anchors to retain them, but on the quality of news front, they're pretty good. The BBC is publicly funded but editorially independent and so their well-written, detailed articles are FREE. The only problem is because they're a British publication, their coverage of America will largely focus on the big headline events. But still pretty good.

So what can you do? Well, read BBC for US news for starters it's less horribly partisan. And if you can afford it, subscribe to the publications you like so they keep going and maybe put out more stuff for free. Or consume the media they do produce that's free like podcasts - those usually have advertising.

And support politicians in favour of higher taxes and more public goods.

[madamspeaker]

What did you think of the new biography? Is it better than Molly Ball's?

There is a rather long answer. I’ve popped it under a cut to spare everyone’s dashboard.

It's disappointing. I'm not saying this to put anyone off reading it - if you haven't read a book about Nancy before, it's a perfectly fine starter - but I suspect I made the error of getting my hopes up when Axios revealed that Paul had been interviewed for it and what it and the interviews with others might mean in terms of overall insights the book might provide. Paul's contribution, such as it is, is lovely, but I have to assume Page didn't spend very long talking to him given how few times he's quoted. I don't know the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, if he simply refused to answer some things, but we get no insight into how he felt to see his wife become Speaker. No insight into how he feels about the Republican attacks on her, the death threats etc. At one stage Alexandra asks her father what he thinks of his name being a dirty word. Page doesn't provide us his answer.

And therein lies the fundamental issue with the book  - potential but no follow through. The accident which the NY Post so callously called their favorite bit is given two lines of attention. I'm not making a case for traumatic stories filling every page, but when Page has spent a bit of time recounting a car accident Paul himself was in as a teenager, it might be worth devoting a little bit of time too to such an event later in Nancy's life when her husband pulls her and their children free of the jeep they were in, but then this feels typical of a book that spends a full chapter on Nancy's relationship with the "squad" but devotes next to no time talking about her longstanding relationships with others in Congress. Barbara Boxer and Rosa DeLauro manage a paragraph, which is more than Nita Lowey, who only gets a passing mention via a reference to Ilhan Omar. Now bear in mind that DeLauro, Lowey, and Pelosi were seen as such a legislative clique that the moniker DeLowSi was coined about them. You'd never know that from this book. Indeed it is never mentioned.

The book spends too much time on things it shouldn't, and doesn't devote nearly enough time, or simply skips altogether, things it should be giving chapters too. Nancy's trip to Tiananmen Square gets a passing mention. This in particular irked me because I'd listened to Nancy recount that trip in a Zoom yesterday afternoon. That whole incident should have been given more page space, but instead it's slipped in without much detail. The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell doesn't even warrant a mention, nor does the climate bill that Nancy had wrangled through the house just before the ACA.

I think the main issue with the book is that is framed within the context of Trump. It's like Page mentally decided that whilst everything before 2016 was fine and moderately interesting, she knew her selling point would be Nancy in the era of the orange freakshow. It's like she wanted to run through everything else so she could get to 2016, but she also knew that she couldn't very well write about Nancy without mentioning the 2008 bailout of the banks, or the ACA. Now to be fair to Page, her chapter on the bailout, "Meltdown" is actually great. It's one of the standouts of the book along with "Earthquake", her chapter on Nancy and AIDS. Indeed "Earthquake" is such a good chapter that I'd probably keep screenshots to hand so that if any leftist asshole ever says Nancy hasn't done anything good, I can reply with them. The other standout is "Sala". Is it better than Ball's? I think they sit at much the same ranking. Each author has her own strengths, and I suspect the fact that Ball wrote her book a full year earlier than Page's might contribute to the focus shift between them. Ball's ACA chapter was genuinely a thrilling read - Page's is less so, but both women make the case that the ACA was as much Nancy's as Obama's, probably more, Page even goes so far as to call the chapter "PelosiCare". The thing I notice with Page though is that her interest seems to wane when Nancy becomes minorirty leader. That period doesn't really get much of a look in beyond mid-terms and leadership elections, whereas Ball, to her credit, kept with Nancy during that period and showed her to be the fixer of messes when things invaraibly went south between Obama and Boehner. Again I think this comes down to Page rushing to get to the Trump years.The other thing that jumped out at me was how Page is less inclined to show Obama as naive. Ball essentially presents a picture of a man, who whilst good and decent, was also legislatively over idealistic, often to the point of throwing Nancy under a bus, only for her to have to crawl out and fix the mess.You get very little of that with Page. There are insinuations from others, but Page never makes the final connection. Just a mention about the book's structure. On the face of it it seems linear and chronological, but within chapters Page has a habit of jumping around, and to the point that she has to explains things twice. I don't know if this is her style, or a case of poor editorial decisions, but at least three times I had to make sure I hadn't accidentally swipped backwards on my ereader when I found myself reading what seemed to be the exact same wording that I had seen minutes earlier. What does it cover? The insurrection is in there, athough given the time Page devotes to it, she'd had been better off not bothering and instead holding off to write something more substantial for the paperback next year. Her deadline seems to have been somewhere between impeachment #2 and inauguration day. The WaPo has a much better account of January 6th than Page does. The ACA and the 2008 bailout get the bulk of the legislative accomplishments, to be expected, but I was genuinely delighted to see Page cover Nancy's AIDS achievements too. Indeed she lists them. Covid relief gets a bit of time, not all that much given how much it dominated last year, but clearly Page's deadline blocked her from covering the ARP. If you are hoping for some insight into how Nancy or her family felt when she became Speaker, or feel about her accomplishments, being the subject of death threats etc, you won't find them here. Nor will you find any mention of what Nancy does for fun (the crossword gets a solitary mention). You'd never guess her to be into theatre or music. Sport gets a brief mention, but that whole recreational side of Nancy just doesn't feature. There is at least one questionable quote source that frankly made me raise my eyebrows when I saw his name. Sean Spicer, not exactly the bastion of truth, is quoted a couple of times in the book. The justification being that he had worked for Bush jnr. Weirdly Page does not interview Bush. She spends a lot of time on Nancy's parents, pre Nancy. I get the need to give some context to the environment Nancy grew up in, but she spends more time on them than she does on Nancy as kid or teenager. Almost like she is compensating for how deficient her book is when it comes to Nancy's personal life.

I appreciate that all that above seems very negative on my part, but when a book is billed as the "definitive biography", and the end result is far from it, then I think some criticism is valid. Page's book is a easy enough read, once you get used to the fact that she can repeat herself. She's fair narrator of Nancy the politician, but like Ball, she never gets close to Nancy away from Congress. Maybe this is why Page stuck on "Lessons of Power" to the title - in a way it gives her cover for essentially failing to get to grips with Nancy away from the Hill. In a way I wish Page and Ball had colaborated - both their books have strengths that the other doesn't, and together they might have been able to manage something more. As it goes, Page's book is a decent enough effort, but it's not definitive. Indeed such a book probably seems unlikely to ever materialise.

[hms-chill]

RWRB Study Guide: Chapter 1

Hi y’all! I’m going through Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue and defining/explaining references! Feel free to follow along, or block the tag #rwrbStudyGuide if you’re not interested!

Jack Ford (1): Son of president Gerald Ford, who was in college during most of his father’s presidency, but made headlines by bringing former Beatle George Harrison to the White House. The Ford children in general were known for causing problems for security and being in general more rebellious than  other first children. (More)

Luci Johnson (1): Daughter of Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson, she changed the spelling of her name at age 18 as a form of rebellion against her parents. (More)

Gloria Steinem (2): A self-described radical feminist who began her work in the late 1960s. She is one of the most famous members of the second-wave feminist movement, and in 2015, she said that as she got older, she felt she was free of the “demands of gender”. (More)

Zora Neale Hurston (2)*: Anthropologist and writer from the Harlem Renaissance. She was a prolific writer who pioneered a style of writing in dialect and focused on Black women’s stories, especially in the American South. Their Eyes Were Watching God is her most popular novel. She was also queer, and lived with poet/playwright Georgia Douglas Johnson. (She’s so cool I love her)

Dolores Huerta (2): Labor union leader and civil rights activist who worked with Cesar Chaves to organize the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, which was a major step in earning rights for the (mostly hispanic) farm workers in southern California. She was the first Latina woman admitted to the National Women’s Hall of Fame and is a hero for much of the Latino community. (More)

Caroline Kennedy (2): Daughter of JFK

Nancy Reagan (3): Wife of Ronald Reagan, whose policies were detrimental for queer and poor folks especially.

Hall & Oates (3): An American pop rock duo from the 1970s. You can listen here and here.

WaPo (4): The Washington Post, a East-coast specific policial newspaper that has been traditionally left-leaning, but is now owned by Jeff Bezos. (More) 

W Hotel (5): A luxury hotel marketed toward a younger demographic that focus on maintaining a fun and relaxing vibe.

Modern-day Kennedys (6): The Kennedys are a dynasty of American politicians 

“Bug” (8): A pun on June’s name, referencing a June bug

Garden State (8): A 2004 movie about an actor/waiter who returns to his hometown of New Jersey after his mother dies. It is based on the director’s experiences and has gained a cult following. It was a favorite at the Sundance Film Festival. (More)

“London Luck, & Love” (8): A Hall & Oates song, a love song about spending time in London and being lucky enough to quickly fall in love with someone. The lyrics are available here

Hill country of Texas (8): An area in central/south Texas that is historically liberal. (More)

Lometa (9): A small town (856 in 2010) in central Texas. (More, Even More)

Fort Hood (9): A large US Military post built in 1942 as a place to test tanks. (More)

Death Comes for the Archbishop (9): A rambling 1927 novel that re-tells the lives of Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf as Catholic clergy in New Mexico. (More, Even More)

“Trash turtles all the way down” (11): “Turtles all the way down” is a phrase that means that things keep getting consistently worse

GQ (11): Gentleman’s Quarterly, a magazine targeted to men and focused on fashion and culture. (More)

MIT (11): The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a very advanced school for STEM subjects. 

Viscount (12): The 4th rank in the British peerage system, above baron and below earl (More)

Cucumber Sandwich (12)**: In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde makes a gay sex/dick joke involving cucumber sandwiches found down on the docks (a place where queer men could often find sex, either for free or for a fee).  

Vampire sex-waifs (13): A reference to the three half-crazed, semi-human women living in Dracula’s castle

Waltz (14)***: A style of ballroom dance that is relatively easy to pick pick up, yet demands at least a bit of rigidity and distance. Henry mentions later that he doesn’t like it.

------

*Hurston is so cool. Scholars have extended what we call the Harlem Renaissance just so she can be in it, and she’s such an incredible writer, and she was so gay and so cool and I love her a lot. She literally perfected the a style of writing in dialogue that works beautifully, and everything I’ve read from her (fiction and nonfiction) has been gorgeous. That’s it; that’s the note.

**I’d just like to shout out my old butch theater prof freshman year who stood in front of this room of dumbass college kids and explained this 200-year-old dick joke. She changed my life (for other, non-dick-joke-related reasons).

***I didn’t want to build this into the packet itself, since it’s more analysis than definition, but the fact that Henry waltzes with June in public when the waltz is a rigid/controlled dance, then later reveals before a private dance with Alex that he doesn’t care for waltzing? And that we don’t even get to know what kind of dance they do, because it’s both too private for even us to know and it’s not one with a name or an easy description; it’s a dance unique to them in that moment? Poetry.

--------

If there’s anything I missed or that you’d like more on, please let me know! And if you’d like to/are able, please consider buying me a ko-fi? I know not everyone can, and that’s fine, but these things take a lot of time/work and I’d really appreciate it!

Chapter 2 

[idairsauthor]

This Fcking Trial, Episode 2: Being Alive

CONN: Senator Collins just announced that she was going to vote to call witnesses.

PLAIDDER: That’s still only 48 people IF Manchin doesn’t do his fucking Manchin thing. Go away.

ETHIR: Don’t talk to him that way.

PLAIDDER: It gets worse!

ETHIR: I have a question and I really need to know the answer right now.

PLAIDDER: I guess in cyberspace it’s always time for freagair.

ETHIR: Who in the green earth or under it is Alan Dershowitz?

PLAIDDER: Ethir. This is unworthy of you. The night before all hope is lost, you come into my house and you ask me to dredge up from the cesspool into which they have subsided my totally 80s memories of celebrity lawyer, self-appointed gadfly, and massive narcissist Alan Dershowitz?!

ETHIR: I do.

PLAIDDER: Ethir, last night I saw Just Mercy, a film based on a real-life case in which a young lawyer named Bryan Stevenson devoted years of his life to obtaining a new trial for an innocent man who was framed by corrupt racist cops for a crime he didn’t commit, prosecuted for that crime by a corrupt racist DA, and given a bonus death sentence by a corrupt racist judge. Unlike most real-life stories in which underfunded young lawyers take on entire power structures, this one actually has a happy ending, and an innocent man who’s spent six years on death row for no good reason is eventually returned to his family. I think you should get a bucket of popcorn and some caffeine-free soda and go watch this movie. You will enjoy it.

ETHIR: But--

PLAIDDER:  I want you to go watch that movie, and then I want you to come back here. And then, when I tell you that Alan Dershowitz got famous in the 1980s for finding a way to get the conviction of a European billionaire who most likely murdered his diabetic wife thrown out and get him a new trial at which he was acquitted based on problems with handling of the evidence, and then gave a dinner party to celebrate which Alan Dershowitz attended and wrote about in his book Reversal Of Fortune which by the way was made into a TV movie in 1990 which I actually to my everlasting shame saw--when I tell you all this, and then tell you that Alan Dershowitz thinks that makes him Bryan fucking Stevenson, you will fully understand my rage. 

ETHIR: All right.

PLAIDDER: In the meantime, can we not talk about how Alan Dershowitz’s narcissism has set fire to the last shreds of our Constitution?

CONN: But that’s exactly what I’m most hopeful about.

PLAIDDER: That...BLOWHARD forgot that he’s not in a damn trial court where the worst he could do to the world is set one rich and guilty asshole free. To satisfy his insatiable fucking ego, that man just burned down the rule of law.

CONN: No, he didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s actually made things better.

PLAIDDER: This oughta be good.

CONN: All along we’ve been talking about that moment when everyone stops pretending. The moment when people just drop the mask for good and all and they just stop caring about whether people see their atrocities or not. We talked about that in July when that Congressional delegation went to see the detention camps at the border. You must have a clip of that somewhere.

PLAIDDER: OK, I found it:

CONN: Their lack of fear, that’s the worst sign. The fact that they don’t fear exposure. The fact that they’re not worried about the rest of the world finding out what they’ve done. Because that tells you that they know they’re protected. And that means they have no reason to stop. Not just that. They have no reason not to make it worse. No reason not to invent new indignities. No reason not to entertain themselves with making more misery.

PLAIDDER: That’s something I’ve always been afraid of. The moment when the state decides it doesn’t have to pretend any more. Theamh is afraid of that moment too–you know–on the magical side. That’s why that battle at Slieve was so important. It forced the corrupt government to go on pretending for a while. As long as they were pretending, there were certain limits to what they were able to do. Theamh and everyone else worked so hard to keep those limits in place.

CONN: You’re right to be afraid of that moment.  

CONN: And you’re afraid that this moment has now come.

PLAIDDER: It has. This is it. 53 Republican Senators--

CONN: Fifty-two--

PLAIDDER: Conn, you are on my LAST NERVE tonight. Fifty-two Republican Senators are about to vote to endorse the idea that the President can rig an election and nobody can do a thing about it.

CONN: No. They won’t be. Because Dershowitz and friends have already retracted that argument.

PLAIDDER: They can’t retract it now. Fox News has a hold of it. The Republican Senators have a hold of it. It’s out there and it’s going to become the new normal.

CONN: You’re not listening to me. THEY WALKED IT BACK. They realized they HAD to walk it back. Because 53 Republican Senators are not ready for this moment.

PLAIDDER: I bet 51 of them are.

CONN: No. That...circus act...that your President calls a legal team has withdrawn that defense because they now realize that these Republican Senators still want to pretend. And where there’s pretense, there’s hope.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, well I just refreshed the WaPo page and we lost Lamar Alexander, so I’m gonna go scream into the night now.

CONN: There’s still--

PLAIDDER: Don’t you get it? These assholes have got together and worked out exactly how it’s going to go down and what will happen is that they will let Collins, Murkowski and Romney vote for witnesses so there’s a 50-50 tie and then Roberts will refuse to cast the tiebreaking vote and there will be no witnesses and the whole thing will be over tomorrow. These people are not taking a stand, they are saving face in the most weaselly way possible. 

CONN: But surely you realize that it doesn’t matter any more whether they call witnesses or not.

PLAIDDER: I DO NOT realize that.

CONN: They don’t have to make Bolton testify. As soon as Alan Dershowitz made that argument, he admitted that your President has done everything he’s been accused of. Everyone saw that, everyone knows that. Anyone who will ever be willing to vote for removal will vote for removal now. And the people who will never be willing to vote for removal will never be convinced no matter how many witnesses you call.

PLAIDDER: So this is it. He gets acquitted. And I SWEAR TO GOD if you say “not yet” ONE MORE TIME--

CONN: All right, I won’t say it.

PLAIDDER: You won’t?

CONN: No. I won’t. Acquittal is what you always expected. That’s is what you always knew was probably going to happen.

PLAIDDER: BUT YOU TOLD ME NOT YET!!!

CONN: MAKE UP YOUR MIND! Or let me go back into the void! I never asked to be dragged out here to this horrible place.

PLAIDDER: Yeah, I’m not gonna watch any more of my favorite characters go through the door to oblivion tonight, friend.

CONN: 67 votes for removal was always an unrealistic threshold. It’s never been done before, I understand.

PLAIDDER: No.

CONN: Trust me when I say this, friend. They overreached. That always has consequences.

PLAIDDER: How can they overreach when they are about to take a vote that will ensure that their party will always have unlimited power?

CONN: That’s not what that vote is going to ensure.

PLAIDDER: Then what will it ensure?

CONN: That your president never gets a second term. And neither will many of them. 

PLAIDDER: Why should I believe you?

CONN: Look at what the Democrats in Congress have been able to do. They dragged that mac na mhada to the brink of removal. Where is your appreciation for Adam Schiff, who got up there day after day and told the actual truth?

PLAIDDER: You mean the “you know you can’t” speech.

CONN: Yes. That and many others. Because the thing is: they DO know they can’t. They definitely know that now. 

PLAIDDER: What does it matter? They will never cross him.

ETHIR: Hey, I’m back.

PLAIDDER: So you see what I mean about Alan Dershowitz.

ETHIR: Actually I saw something totally different.

PLAIDDER: What?

ETHIR: You know that scene where Ralph Myers takes the stand at that hearing and he tells everyone that he lied at that first trial?

PLAIDDER: Yes.

ETHIR: And he’s scared to do it. But once he does it, you can see the whole man come back to life. He’s told the truth and now no matter what happens to him, he doesn’t care, because he’s alive now. I mean you wrote our story but you spend all your time on the shriias, you’ve never really thought about how ordinary people experience the truth. I will tell you, I’ve seen a lot of people lie in court and I’ve seen a lot of people tell the truth and there is no comparison. Telling the truth is magic for us too. It’s...it’s being alive.

PLAIDDER: Anthony Scaramucci, of all people, has said as much.

ETHIR: I wish Theamh could have seen Slythe during the trial. She would have been so proud of her. Still an ordinary woman, but once she caught a hold of the truth again she never let it go. She understood it better than I can explain it. You could see it when you looked at her. I think she knew there was a good chance they would kill her. But it was worth it to her, just for that feeling of being alive. Humans are humans. They need joy. They need to feel alive. 

PLAIDDER: How are you making me cry when I don’t believe EITHER of you?

CONN: It’s like your Nancy Pelosi always says. Patience and time.

PLAIDDER: That was Kutuzov in War and Peace.

CONN: Well she doesn’t say it. But she knows it. She dragged this process out as long as she could safely drag it and what can be exposed has been exposed. Whatever happens tomorrow, you got more out of this than anyone expected. Be mindful of that. And just...be all right. All right?

PLAIDDER: All right. I guess this will be our last episode.

CONN: Maybe not y--

PLAIDDER: THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT.

[exeggcute]

the timeline

in 2021, a high-ranking priest in the US conference of catholic bishops (or USCCB) named jeffrey burrill was outed as gay and forced to resign. the USCCB said they had obtained (1) proof that he was using grindr and (2) location data tying burrill's movement to several gay bars. they did not explain how the hell they figured this out, only that the information was obtained from a data vendor and spanned several month-long periods between 2018 and 2020.

a couple key notes here about data vendors/brokers: it's not uncommon for advertising exchanges to scrape together a bunch of junk data and sell it to random third parties. it's usually demographic data for audience-sorting purposes—and even the demographics themselves are generally predictions based on behavior, like how I look up enough arthritis-related keywords that google thinks I'm a senior citizen.

which is to say that them accessing data from a broker isn't hard to believe, but absolutely nothing in that dataset would come close to the kind of smoking-gun proof that gets a priest fired for visiting gay bars. this isn't like a phone book full of names and addresses, it's billions of rows of data each saying that publisher <abc> sold an ad through exchange <xyz> in auction number <00000> at <$X> price to a device with <list of generally anonymous characteristics>.

(truly sensitive info can and does get sold to data brokers, but it's not the norm, and it's usually sold by publishers rather than by ad exchanges. in your average bid request, there's not really even a standardized way to include much more demographic info than some basic age/gender stuff and the device's estimated location—nor are any of these data points strictly required.)

(I've already lost the plot here, but if you're curious, almost all programmatic advertising uses a protocol called the OpenRTB API. if you're curious what exactly gets passed through these real-time bids, you can read the API reference in its entirety, although god only knows why they chose to stick it all in a fucking PDF.)

anyway. also in 2021, an ex-adtech guy read this news, rightfully was like "okay but how the hell did they actually figure that out" and then wrote a detailed substack post speculating exactly how the USCCB might've been able to pull this shit off. the technical explanations here are what I find the most interesting (worth reading the whole thing imo, but I'll give a condensed version below); however, he poses a very salient and completely unanswered question (emphasis mine):

None of this requires ninja-level technology or skills, but it’s way beyond the level of the Googling around or spreadsheet hacking of your average normie conspiracy-theorist or journalist. Particularly if the hacker had done all this analysis for several targets over years of time; that’s a considerable amount of work and expense (this data certainly isn’t free, and they bought a lot of it). Somebody wanted Burrill and possibly others to go down. That’s the real mystery in this story: Who? Why?

point that won't make sense until later: in the middle of 2021, apple rolled out iOS v14.5, which among other things made the IDFA ("identifier for advertisers") something that users have to opt into rather than something that's enabled by default. android followed suit not long after and let users choose to opt out of the android equivalent.

another brief tangent: an IDFA is a unique alphanumeric string associated with a particular physical device. the string itself contains exactly zero identifying information (other than, technically, specifying whether you're on an android or iOS device because each ecosystem uses slightly different identifiers)—this is useful since in-app environments don't use cookies. it lets advertisers figure out that user #12345678 who viewed an ad in their mobile browser is the same user #12345678 who viewed an ad in candy crush.

in 2022, I guess burrill was able to find work again, so that's nice.

in 2023, wapo did some digging and found out that the group behind burrill's outing is a colorado-based nonprofit called "catholic laity and clergy for renewal." among the revelations:

the nonprofit's stated goal is "to 'empower the church to carry out its mission' by giving bishops 'evidence-based resources' with which to identify weaknesses in how they train priests." what this amounts to is basically just spying.

burrill almost certainly wasn't the only guy they were spying on, although it's unclear at this point if the nonprofit's actions got anyone else outed or fired.

the nonprofit has spent at least $4 million dollars so far, although it's also unclear exactly much of that was spent on buying brokered data versus like... idk, anything else you'd use to spy on priests?

the ex-adtech guy's "but how the hell did they do that" speculation was pretty much exactly correct.

the technology

the ex-adtech guy's substack post explains everything beautifully, so I don't just wanna reiterate everything he's already said. however, I do worry that some of the finer points might be lost on anyone who isn't already familiar with the architecture underpinning everything.

first, a very brief programmatic explainer:

when you load a webpage that's coded to contain an ad, the publisher (owner of the webpage where the ad will be shown) puts the ad inventory (fancy term for "ad space with no ad in it yet") up for sale on a real-time auction marketplace. this announcement that an auction is about to occur is called a bid request.

the bid request follows a particular protocol called the OpenRTB protocol (remember that earlier tangent?); it's both a trigger for an auction to occur and an object that itself contains data about (1) the type of inventory being sold and (2) the user to whom the ad will be displayed—though not much data at all. page 15 of this PDF outlines what a standard BidRequest object looks like.

this is not a form of user data per se, but one of the fields in the BidRequest object is the name/ID of the publisher where the ad is being served. which makes sense

this BidRequest object is sent out to various ad exchanges who buy and sell ads on behalf of brands. brands can bid on the ad inventory being offered; whoever makes the highest offer, naturally, wins.

the winning brand gets to display their ad creative (fancy term for "the banner or video or whatever") on the page that you loaded.

this whole process takes roughly 100 milliseconds, give or take—so fast that you probably didn't even realize that the ad wasn't preselected when you loaded the page.

two important things to internalize here: (1) the BidRequest object contains a very, very small amount of data about each user and device who triggered a bid request, and (2) the BidRequest object gets sent to a lot of parties, not just the one who wins the auction; this is one way that data can trickle up to third-party data brokers.

you with me still? take a breather if you need to.

so. if you're a catholic nonprofit with four million dollars to burn, you can buy huge bundles of data from random parties who get their hands on it. this data is mostly full of random numbers that aren't useful outside of specific contexts.

but remember my other tangent about the IDFA? the unique identifier that's assigned to mobile devices? you can use the IDFA to determine that X number of bid requests across Y number of apps happened on the same device—it won't tell you who owns the device, just that all of the bid requests came from The Same Guy. (there's some other info you can scrape together there, like what operating system the device in question is running, but most of it isn't especially juicy imo.) you'll also see the date and time that each bid request occurred.

except I sort of lied, because there is one more elephant in the room: location data.

check out page 29 of this PDF. the Geo object included in each BidRequest includes some basic location data about the user/device at the time of the bid request, and it's actually pretty fuzzy: you can include the latitude and longitude if you're confident they're accurate, but they're not often accurate, so a lot of time you're just getting the city/state/zip. (on one hand, creepy, but on the other hand, the picture we've put together so far is still just "One Guy in boston has an iphone and he uses both candy crush and google chrome.")

grindr's whole schtick requires accurate location data, so let's assume the latitude and longitude data for grindr bid requests is accurate enough to include in our bid requests.

let's put all that together, then:

we can sift through billions of rows of data and chunk them into distinct users based on each user's distinct IDFA.

for any given user, we can look at the information from each bid request and see the names/IDs of the app where the inventory was offered. (in other words, was the user's device trying to display an ad in candy crush? in tiktok? in grindr?)

in most cases, for any given user, we can see the location data of each bid request. (of the bid requests triggered in grindr, where was the user?)

for any given user, we can see the timestamp of each bid request. (of the bid requests triggered in grindr at this date and time, what date and time did they occur?)

so if we're really, really inclined to put all this together (and let me stress how infrequently anyone would ever do this), we'd know that One Guy was using grindr in X location at Y time/date. we don't know this guy's legal name, or his grindr username, or his email address, or where he lives, or what he does for a living, or whether he's gay, although we do know that he uses grindr so that might be a freebie.

and this, THIS is why the catholic nonprofit's whole shit is so goddamn diabolical—their whole operation hinged on knowing burrill's real-life location with extreme precision

I'll let mr. substack take over here (again, emphasis mine):

As reported, Burrill is a diocesan priest in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Where is he every Sunday morning around 10:30 a.m.? Giving mass at St. James the Greater Catholic Church on 11th Street is where (or at one of a few Catholic churches). Sure, if we were to draw a circle a couple hundred meters wide around St. James, and tally up the unique set of IDs that appear there on Sunday mornings, we’d turn up hundreds. But which one is always there, month after month?

Modern databases allow easy construction of geo-based queries of the form: “find all rows with data within x meters of this lat/long, and from 9 to 11 a.m. on Sundays”. Also, who’s always at whatever rectory Eau Claire diocesan priests reside in, plus whatever public occasions or conferences a senior cleric such as Burrill would surely attend? The geo data can be massive and noisy, but as with any noisy signal, average over enough data and the signal starts coming through. The attacker probably had to look at years of data to unambiguously narrow this down. This attack was long in the making, and took months (at least) to pull off.

TL;DR: a catholic nonprofit was able to out a gay priest because they sifted through a metric fuckton of ad data to pinpoint any devices that (1) triggered bid requests to display ads on grindr or other hookup apps and (2) followed an extremely specific location pattern that the nonprofit could corroborate against the movement of any priests whose locations they were manually tracking.

which is creepy as hell, but also worth noting that it only worked because they already had tabs on him in the real world and an enormous amount of time and money.

the takeaways

the amount of information flowing through the programmatic advertising ecosystem (and then continuing to flow to third-party data brokers) is staggering.

there's a reason ads (and their related data) are bought and sold in aggregate—individual data points are neither very valuable nor very useful in all but the most extreme cases. the sheer quantity of data is enough to guarantee you relative anonymity in all but the most insane edge cases.

that said, our collective privacy matters. the risk to me as an individual may be negligible, but this data is still valuable (and potentially risky) at scale... hence why the third-party data market is so huge.

despite my knowledge of programmatic advertising in general, I'm not actually well-versed enough in the whole third-party brokers situation to really offer a specific takeaway. I do think there's a clear fucking lack of regulation, with all the requisite concerns that brings, especially since third-party data isn't a requirement for the programmatic ecosystem to function the way it's supposed to.

now that the IDFA is (somewhat) obsolete, this is no longer a reliable method of outing gay priests. if the gay priest in question had opted out of IDFA tracking, I wouldn't say it'd be impossible to pull this off, but it would certainly be easier and more cost effective to just like, plant a spycam in his little starched collar.

here's a guide on how to disable IDFA on your android or iOS device. I should stress that the risks of not opting out are minimal, unless someone with a multimillion dollar budget and an intimate knowledge of your day-to-day location is hellbent on fucking you over specifically, but you know. doesn't hurt.

try to stay out of the crosshairs of american catholic nonprofits.

oh I also also went down a minor rabbit hole yesterday reading about this catholic nonprofit that essentially used advertising data tied to hookup apps to out several gay priests, which is super interesting to me both as an affronted homo and someone with one foot in the world of programmatic bullshit, so I'm tempted to share some links on here but I feel like I'd need to include a lot of disclaimers and explainers lest this get twisted into some kind of "advertisers know literally everything about you" hysteria because it's really not like that at all, believe it or not. the privacy implications are still significant (i.e., bad) but I think the crazier takeaway is how there's just so much data being fed through these systems (billions of ad impressions! every single day!) that trying to leverage any of it in a life-ruining way is only possible under an extremely specific and increasingly unlikely set of circumstances. my first thought was to compare it to finding a needle in a haystack but I think it's actually more like combing through a landfill to piece together a shredded credit card statement.

[whitehotharlots]

This is the end game for everyone, including you

Tens of thousands of federal contract workers will not receive back pay for work they did during the government shut down. Their pay has been stolen. Many outlets, including ones like money.com which are usually pretty damn conservative, are writing pieces that focus mostly on the human costs of this theft: doing Woke due diligence, as it were--just listening, providing spaces for bodies and voices, etc. It’s cold comfort at best, exploitation at worst, but it’s the only means of resistance liberals have been able to articulate for the past 10 years or so. 

You’d think this would lead to rioting. Or at least property destruction, some kind of righteous backlash. But we all know how heavily criminalized actual resistance is. Or, fuck, this would be the sort of issue that would receive like 95%, fully bipartisan approval, right? Pay the people for the work they did. That’s a no-brainer.

But it’s not. On the right, not paying your employees is a matter of fierce pride. Donald Trump built his empire on refusing to pay contractors for the work they did, and that was touted as one of his genius business skills. On the left, no one cares. The wage theft victims got a write up in WaPo. Their voices were heard. Their bodies were photographed. What else could they possibly want? Presumably there’s some white people among the unpaid. Trying to help them would amount to a denial and endorsement of their complicity in privilege. 

Things are more extremely phrased now, and both sides have abandoned all pretenses of empathy and civility, but this has been the general back and forth for the last 4 decades: the right glibly steals from poor people, while the left proffers equivocations meant to look, kinda sorta, like resistance but are actually just excuses for the violence and profligacy of the powerful. 

Wage theft is completely normalized. It’s naive to suggest it’s immoral to pay international workers less than a dollar a day. It’s even more naive to think that anybody, especially cops and regulatory agencies, would ever do anything to stop it or to help its victims seek redress. The rich should be able to force you to work for free. And you should thank them for the privilege. Anyone who suggests otherwise is blinded by selfishness or whiteness or masculinity or whatever other generalized toxicity we used to regard as basic human dignity. 

It’s not going to get any better. There is no mechanism in place to so much as begin addressing this: no plan, no strategy, no willpower. Everyone has become too dedicated to excusing and celebrating the status quo, too attached to nonsense solutions that a priori reject any strides towards collective action or mass resistance. And it’s going to keep spreading. The ruling class knows that basic comfort is about to get exponentially more expensive, and they are hoarding as much as they can before everything blows up. Now it’s contract workers. Next month it will be all federal employees. Then all state employees. Then all service workers. And then, next you know, everyone will be treated with as much carceral disposability as the maquiladora’s lineworker or the rich liberal woman’s Hondoruan maid. This is the freedom we’ve all been promised by neobliberal globalization: this is what the bipartisan consensus has told us we’re never allowed to criticize. It’s finally arrived stateside, finally begun to affect people who have the proper documentation and have kept everything above board. And it’s here to stay. 

[101now]

Top news stories Google.com usa 12-16-22 101now.con simply FIRE 🔥 news

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[hellstobetsy]

Last night's SmackDown on the USA Network averaged 1.833 million viewers, the lowest number for the show since the 2016 brand split and its move to airing live on Tuesday nights.

The show was down 12 percent from last week and almost 25 percent from the same week in 2018. This followed a night in which Raw was down almost 30 percent year-over-year, and SmackDown retained the usual 85 percent of Monday's audience. The SmackDown number is usually tied in some ways to the Raw number, so this is not at all surprising.

SmackDown usually finishes in the middle of the top 10 in terms of total cable viewers for the night, but it fell all the way to 15th yesterday. Perhaps more importantly, in the key 18-49 demo, where SmackDown is usually first or second, the show fell to seventh on the night with a 0.54 rating.

SmackDown did air opposite an NBA playoff game between the Milwaukee Bucks and Boston Celtics that did a big audience of 4.404 million. A later game featuring the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets did an even bigger audience of 6.073 million, starting at 10:30 p.m. Even an NHL playoff game finished close to SmackDown in viewers with 1.664 million, and it beat SmackDown in the demo.

Miz and Mrs., which follows SmackDown on USA Network, did another series low with 840,000 viewers.

As bad as these numbers are, they could get even lower with the NBA playoffs getting into the deeper rounds and network TV shows soon airing their season finales, which are often the highest rated episodes of the year. For instance, the May 1, 2018 episode of SmackDown did 2.436 million viewers, with the show falling to 2.195 million for the May 29 episode. If the number falls at the same rate this year, that could mean a number as low as 1.65 million by the end of the month.

Here's a look at the last 10 weeks of SmackDown viewership as compared to the same week in 2018:

Well, WWE may be in a ratings free-fall, and they may be seeing huge drops in attendance, and they may have have back-to-back PR debacles in the form of doing a Saudi Arabia show the week after Saudi Arabia killed a WaPo journalist and then a John Oliver segment about how they mistreat workers, and they may have morale problems where said worker are all either quitting (John Cena, Dean Ambrose, Adrian Neville, Tye Dillenger, Hideo Itami) or refusing to work in an attempt to force WWE to release them from their contracts (Sasha Banks, The Revivial, Luke Harper), and they may be getting real competition in the form of All Elite Wrestling, and they may be watching one of the top stars who just quit going viral by all-but-announcing he’ll be working for said All Elite Wrestling....

But at least the quality of their writing is ungodly terrible, even by pro wrestling standards. They got that going for them.

[theculturedmarxist]

After first being teased in early February, a new version of the highly controversial EARN IT Act has officially been reintroduced to lawmakers. And some of its most fervent advocates are finally being open about their true mission: undermining encryption.

Back when the original EARN IT Act was introduced in 2020, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) — who co-wrote the bill — did his best to skirt around the issue of encryption entirely, despite its being one of the bill’s main focuses. During hearings about the bill, Sen. Blumenthal consistently pushed for a narrative that EARN IT was not about encryption at all.

“The bill says nothing about encryption. … Big Tech is using encryption as a subterfuge to oppose this bill,” Sen. Blumenthal said at the time.

Now Blumenthal is walking back his words — and not even in a way that admits he’s changed his tune. In an interview cited by The Washington Post, Blumenthal finally addressed the encryption-based elephant in the room. But not in a way that will quell anyone’s concerns.

Oh so now it’s about encryption — The impetus behind the EARN IT Act has always been minimizing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by holding websites and internet providers accountable for any such material they might host. Under EARN IT, all companies that have built encryption into their customer-facing products would need to build special backdoor access for government use.

During the EARN IT Act’s first time around the legislative branch, Sen. Blumenthal did everything in his power to skirt around the issue of encryption, despite it being a main tenant of the bill. This time he’s addressing it, albeit in a roundabout way.

Speaking to advocates’ worry that companies will be less inclined to implement encryption at all, given that they’d need to create backdoor access, too, Blumenthal said (via WaPo):

… that lawmakers incorporated these concerns into revisions, which prevent the implementation of encryption from being the sole evidence of a company’s liability for child porn. But he said lawmakers wouldn’t offer a blanket exemption to using encryption as evidence, arguing companies might use it as a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”

If this doesn’t make much sense to you, that’s likely because it doesn’t really make much sense at all. Blumenthal is no longer pretending the encryption bit in the bill is meaningless, but he’s still unwilling to address the serious threats it proposes.

Here’s one more peek at how Blumenthal is still attempting to skirt around the bill’s encryption issues in an even more roundabout fashion (from an EARN IT markup session:

That’s the key distinction here. Doesn’t prohibit use of encryption, doesn’t create liability for using encryption, but the misuse of encryption to further illegal activity is what gives rise to liability here. That’s the very simple answer…

Not like this — Rather than simply denying the encryption issue at all, this time around Sen. Blumenthal is doing everything he can — up to and including spewing nonsense sentences — to minimize the encryption clause’s impact. Activists and internet experts aren’t ready to just let him get away with it.

Encryption services have grown in popularity over the last few years as our understanding of them as a necessary part of safe, private communications has risen to prominence. Creating explicit backdoor access would undermine the entire project of encryption; the whole point is that no one can see it except those communicating with each other.

Major advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are working overtime to raise awareness of the bill’s implications.

“State legislatures will have unprecedented power over websites, both large and small, and will likely pressure companies to scan not only messages, but cloud storage, online photos, and entire websites,” the EFF writes on its action page. “This requirement will put encryption providers in an awful conundrum: either face the possibility of losing everything in a prosecution or costly litigation, or undermine their users’ security, making all of us more vulnerable to online criminals.”

Somehow the EARN IT Act manages to be even more problematic than its anti-encryption clauses. As an almost direct successor to SESTA/FOSTA — the 2018 bill that was meant to limit sex trafficking on the internet — the EARN IT Act brings with it the possibility of similarly dire consequences. (SESTA/FOSTA has had a ripple effect that’s deplatformed countless sex workers and disproportionately affected LGBTQ communities.)

WE HAVE TO KILL THIS BILL IF WE WANT THE INTERNET TO NOT BE CENSORED BY THE CHRISTIAN FAR RIGHT