#i HATE the surveillance state!!!

[sonflwers]

maybe unpopular opinion but i’m not gonna lie if anyone can pull off “ai” as a game mechanic it’s big brother. it’s so low production value that it’s camp honestly i mean look at her.

[dailykugisaki]

Day 115 | id in alt

She was gonna take Maki to Chili's but when has most things Kugisaki has planned gone right.

(I apologize for the late posting, when the stuff started I was trying to get more exposure onto the things happening so I wasn't going to finish this in the timeframe I've made myself💥 Hope y'all doin alright)

[swan2swan]

So let me describe my favorite part of Madame Web: my taxi hypothesis.

You see, this is what I think happened: one of the writers--or multiple writers--and possibly some crew had a plan. They wanted to throw in the most obvious plot hole to see if someone would fix it. They wanted to know if someone at any point in the supervision would call out a completely ludicrous and unbelievable element of the story...and when no one did, they kept pushing it further, just to see how much they could get away with.

Specifically: the getaway taxi.

Yes, the Getaway Taxi. At one point, Cass takes the kids and piles them into a taxi cab to escape from a train station swarming with cops, in the middle of the day in New York City.

No one tries to stop them.

They don't Immediately Leave the City, they're just driving down the street. There's no driver to be seen. No police try to stop them.

An alert is put out, which they listen to in the taxi cab, of a woman who kidnapped three teenagers. At no point is it mentioned that they may have stolen a taxi that went missing near a train station. At no point is a missing taxi mentioned.

So...you see how this is a problem. Obviously someone's going to report that Taxi 28X5 has been stolen. Check every taxi, radio that taxi, find it just like they did in Godzilla 1998, because it's got a number on top and it's painted bright yellow.

No.

Nobody does that.

But wait!

Then, Cass takes the license plates off! Which would help to hide the vehicle...if it was any other car. But she leaves the sign on top. The numbers are still there, she just turned it into a car driving around NYC without license plates.

AND THEN...

SHE CRASHES THE TAXI INTO A DINER TO TAKE OUT THE BAD GUY.

AND THEN DRIVES OFF!

Aaaaand:

THERE'S A HOLE ON THE HOOD ABOVE THE REMOVED PLATES UNDER THE NUMBER ON THE YELLOW TAXI

THERE'S A HOLE ON THE HOOD ABOVE THE REMOVED PLATES UNDER THE NUMBER ON THE YELLOW TAXI.

THERE'S A HOLE.

THERE'S A HOLE.

THERE'S A HOLE ON THE HOOD ABOVE THE REMOVED PLATES UNDER THE NUMBER ON THE YELLOW TAXI.

Now, she skips town here, so it's kind of okay that she's taking a taxi to a hotel out in the middle of nowhere...but then she goes back with the taxi, then goes to the AIRPORT to go to PERU, which means she's finally ditched the damaged, plateless, numbered, yellow stolen taxi....until she comes back and takes the taxi right back to Queens!!!!!!!

It's incredible!

There's no way this should have ever worked! I have never seen a worse and more questionable and impossible feat!

But it happens! It's what they did! This is an actual thread in the movie!!!!

You don't know how hard I was cheering when it kept getting worse, you have to see this movie.

[underwaterspaghetti314]

I hate you apps that display my location for everyone to see. I hate you apps that tell other people when I’m online or not. I hate you apps that make me in any way more visible to the general public.

[apparentlyautistick]

Surveillance state.

[aeide-thea]

apropos of nothing but like. there was much 2 discuss in atfots but the thing i actually in practice find myself thinking abt on the reg (besides the weird gratuitous antisemitism of the secret underground dinosaur people) was the bit abt like. needing a pause after a long voyage to help you reintegrate into society and how i, too, need one of those but for like. reintegrating into the household dynamic every time i get back from leaving the house

[carelesscuriosity]

Captain Laserhawk kinda sucked? It felt like an ip-focused cash grab that didn’t actually have anything meaningful to say covered with a coat of cyberpunk paint

[enough-spider-noir-stuff]

oops: local fanfic author tried to write a funny fic while staying in character, now it turns out this character has major trust issues

[voidfeather]

man tiktok having a thing where they "clock" people via their artstyle as being proship is so heinous to me, like it's clearly a thinly-veiled attempt at "acceptably" harassing (even if lightly) people via assumption-based profiling which ideologically speaking i'm extremely against

that being said, i do wonder if my artstyle falls under what they'd label as "proship artstyle" and if so, would they consider the source as having a "proship artstyle" too considering i'm very much a copycat or would they go on and on about how it must suck for the creators to have a proshipper fan like they like to do

[thedeafprophet]

i aint gonna stop using it because brain hates change but man FUCK clip studio paint

putting ai nonsense into their program >:( specifically with the stable diffusion model that was not only trained on stolen art, but also some articles say there was medical photos in the training database

honestly thats terrifying... if you were in any published case study by a doctor and those images can come up in image searches,,, no matter how far deep.

Posted online at all really, your face can be in a computer-generating image database entirely without your knowledge or consent. gosh the modern world is scary

[its-a-crazy-world-aintit]

I have found more and more that while not the best movie Anon was right about surveillance.

Two quotes stand out to me from two different characters.

“It’s not that I have something to hide. I have nothing I want you to see.”

And

“We rely on transparency. We can’t control what we can’t see. We require persistent identity.”

Those in power are usually for constant surveillance because it makes it easier to control people and their actions.

Most people who dislike surveillance in general aren’t afraid of being caught doing something wrong. They just want to be left alone to live their life with out dealing with other’s intentions. For good or bad.

little thingy from the other week, stuff on my mind

[oscargender]

I HATE US AIRPORT SECURITY

[meguwumibear]

i am so livid my new job made me set up an account on this government website to prove i am who i say i am and that im qualified to work in my field without warning me the information wouldnt be kept private so my whole address and number is now completely visible when my name is googled 🙃🙃

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.

[a-bit-lonely]

So I did some reading on this. The company being discussed, Berla Corporation, exclusively makes digital forensics tools for cars. Which is to say, they didn’t make the apple carplay in your car.

They did figure out how to read all the data the cool screen in your car has stored.

As far as I can tell their services are only used in coordination with law enforcement. Which isn’t much better but it does mean that your text messages aren’t being sold to advertisers.

As for the lawsuit, it is a privacy suit against several car manufacturers for storing user data without consent. So they’re suing things like Honda, Toyota, General Motors.

The lawsuit was for the collection and storage of data. As far as I can tell, these systems aren’t capable of transmitting it (you need to have physical access to the car to get the data) but the judge’s ruling specifically said it would be legal for them to transmit it so that may change in the future.

My point is: yes they are collecting all the data they can, no they can’t access it without physically accessing your car, and only law enforcement partnered with Berla or hackers who have unlawful access to Berla’s technology can read it.

beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company’s vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system. An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla’s software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.

Yikes. Your car is probably keeping all your text messages and sending them to its manufacturer if you connect to your infotainment system.

The manufacturer does two things with this data:

shares it with law enforcement

sells it to advertisers for extra revenue

HOW WONDERFUL