#see if we may not eff it after all ( blog update )

[anobjectshowguy]

I hope people in the OSC (and other fandoms in general) who are ok with or neutral about Kosa realize that not only will we lose a bunch of platforms that allow us to interact with each other (Tumblr, discord, Ao3, Wattpad, Twitter, YouTube, etc) but will also get rid of at least 80-95% of our fandom.

The OSC consists mostly of people between 13-17 who (if Kosa goes through the Senate and Houses of Representatives and gets passed as a law) will most likely no longer have access to YouTube and other social platforms which actively kills almost all the people who read and watch Object Shows!

By visiting and sharing animated shows like II or BFDI those creators make money which gives them the means to keep making their shows and paying their animators, voice actors, writers and so much more. This bill will actively get rid of most of the people who watch these shows which will cause a large loss in support and revenue for these creators and will most likely mean the end for any smaller object show.

Object show comics rely on people sharing them around in fandom spaces since they’re not animated and put on YouTube like animated object shows are. By losing these spaces and the people who support their content these creators will no longer be able to reach a large audience and get the support they need to continue their comics. This means that we will lose a lot of the comics that the OSC has!

Most of the content you see in the OSC is made by minors, which this bill will actively destroy and thus kill this fandom and many others!

So I am begging of you OSC and other communities, Please please please sign petitions, tell your senators and representatives that you don’t want this bill to pass, and tell anyone that you can reach about how this Bill is a violation of privacy and minors' rights! Re-blog anything you see with helpful information about what Kosa is and keep talking about it! We need to tell people about it so that this doesn’t go through the Senate. Remember, the final day is February 26, we don’t have that long!!!

Here’s some helpful resources:

 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/you-can-help-stop-these-bad-internet-bills

[anderwhohn]

Made some decent headway on getting some of the verses better filled in and/or up-to-date. There's a lot of these that are marked "done" (green dots) that still have some more work to do on them, but at least there's enough info there not to just be "to be announced" for all of it.

[cut for inevitable length due to the pic of the scrivener binder]

If you ever wonder why it takes me so long to get blurbs on verse pages and the like, this is just the folder/file binder for part of my notes for where I'm writing out all the details in order to put into code for the pages on my blogs:

[cut for length & rambles]

The purple dots are the ones that are more-or-less ready for code pushes, the orange is works-in-progress, and the red is what needs to be reevaluated and/or redone from scratch (often where everything is still "to be announced" because I never got anything typed up for that verse at all). The pink and yellow are more just of the "still working on sorting" variety, though most everything under those folders is either WIPs or needs to be redone.

I just don't have the spoons to do all the necessary writing and coding in a single sitting. I am planning on trying to get at least a brief note of what the intended arc for each verse is meant to be, especially where AUs and crossovers are concerned, but otherwise, getting full blurbs for everything will still take time.

Though, to be fair, I think at last count, I have something like over 250 tagged verses and subverses across all four blogs, so is it really any wonder it takes me a bit to get it all sorted, especially when I don't even know which ones are always going to see use, so putting priority to any of them is difficult most days.

It's another reason I ask people fill out the interest tracker - it helps me know where to focus my attention on which muses' verses need to be prioritized for getting the info typed up and coded. Because like, with the Starfleet AUs for the Mass Effect muses - those are low priority because currently, Ashley is the only one with interest in those, and we're at a point of throwing anything and everything at each other with little to no details because we've been writing together since 2018, so having the info on the pages isn't as necessary as, say, Shepard getting thrown into another universe by the Crucible or some fucked up Cerberus experiment going wrong or whatnot.

Also, I'm currently fighting the urge to just delete this post before I've even finished typing it, because my social anxiety goes haywire with posting ooc stuff like this sometimes, so even though it's a matter of "I'm working behind the scenes to make the blog better for easier interactions", I end up having to fight down panic attacks because my brain is dumb and is misfiring chemicals at me over the idea of actually interacting with people I actually like? (I get panic attacks over having to talk to my own family, ffs. It's weird, okay? I seriously miss being on anti-anxiety meds...)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#15yrsago Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM

Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, has responded to my blog-post in which I take issue with Wired's latest product-review magazine, which breathes hardly a mention of DRM even as it reviews devices that are all crapped up with studio-paranoia-generated restriction technology.

Chris takes a "middle ground" position that I've heard described as "radical centrism" -- his position is that the EFF's opposition to DRM is "idealistic" and that there is therefore a practical "reality" that is better suited to the world. I think it's a false dichotomy, and I'd like to have a little go at Chris's post here and see if I can show why:

Consumers want more content, easier-to-use technology, and cheaper prices. If some form of DRM encourages publishers, consumer electronics makers and retailers to release more, better and cheaper digital media and devices, that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is just being realistic: much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots. If a little protection allows them to throw their weight behind a lot of progress towards realizing the potential of digital media, consumers will see a net benefit.

This is the crux of the argument. It starts out by saying that DRM is protection. And protection makes Hollywood comfortable. And a comfortable Hollywood will release more material. And the more material there is, the cheaper it will get.

But all of those propositions are materially untrue. Start with "DRM is protection." DRM is not protection. There has never been a DRM-covered file that was kept off the Internet. Ever. DRM has never once in the history of the field kept a file from appearing online, or from being booted by organized crime pirates. Despite its rhetoric on this, Hollywood is perfectly aware of how bogus the DRM-is-protection claim is; any entertainment exec you put on this spot on this will retreat to a badly-thought-out mantra to the effect that "DRM is a speedbump, it's not meant to keep files off the Internet, it's meant to 'keep honest users honest.'" As Ed Felten has pointed out, keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM may keep a naive user from buying a cheap DVD abroad and bringing it home, and it may make it possible to charge you for things that you used to get for free, like format-shifting, but it won't ever keep an honest user honest.

DRM isn't protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition. If you believe that "much as we might want it to be otherwise, content owners still call most of the shots," then you believe that the guy who makes the record should get a veto over the design of the record player. That the film studios should be able to ban the VCR. That the recording industry should have been able to shove SDMI down all our throats and make MP3 disappear.

This is a profoundly ahistorical proposition. Never in the history of media from the dawn of the printing press right up to the invention of the DVD have we afforded this kind of privilege to incumbent rightsholders. Quite the contrary: at every turn, brave entrepreneurs have engaged in "piracy" of copyrighted works (through devices like the record player, radio, cable television and VCR) and kept at it until the law caught up with the technology.

It's different with the DVD. With the DVD, the electronics companies completely wimped out. They traded their customers to the studios for two packs of cigarettes, and the result has been a decade of stagnation in DVD players. There's no indication that movies are being released sooner or more cheaply on DVD than they were on VHS; and in fact, the release of movies on VHS was preceded by incredible, absurd hyperbole about the video-cassette's inevitable destruction of the film industry and the complete impossibility of a movie ever being released by a studio for viewing on your VCR.

If you believe that "content owners still call most of the shots" then you believe that the studios will make movies and just not release them, they will amass a great pile of unreleased material in their Hollywood vaults and sit before the doors, arms folded, glaring at the world until it arranges itself into a more accomodating configuration. It is ridiculous. DRM hasn't convinced the studios to put new material online -- the offerings that the studios have put online are a pathetic shadow of the material one can download from the P2P networks. The studios have all the DRM in the universe at their disposal, but they're not using it to bring new material to market.

Nope, they're using it to sell you the same crap for more money. Chris loves his Microsoft Media Center PC, "essentially a DVR on steroids" -- at least, he loves it so far. That's because he hasn't been bitten on the ass by it yet, like this guy, who bought a Media Center PC so that he could catch the Sopranos and burn them to DVD. When he bought the PC, it was capable of doing that. Halfway through the season, the studios reached into his living room and broke his PC, disabling the feature that allowed him to burn his Sopranos episodes to DVD. And if you got suckered into letting your cable company give you a "free" PVR, you've got a nasty shock coming this season: your episodes of Six Feet Under will delete themselves from your hard drive after two weeks, whether you've gotten around to watching them or not.

If you want to watch all the Sopranos or Six Feet Unders in a row at the end of the season, you'll have to do it on Pay Per View. You'll have to buy what you used to get for free: the right to record a show and watch it for as long as you'd like. You get less, you pay more. And the studios can change the rules of the game after you've bought the box and brought it home: the only way you can protect your investment is if you can somehow ensure that no studio executive decides to revoke one of the features you paid for back when the box was on the show-room floor. Remember, these are the same studio execs who are duking it out for the right to limit how long a pause button can work for.

Chris likes the iTunes Music Store, calling it a success, but it's got the same problems as the Media Center and all the other DRM devices. The record labels can demand that Apple selectively break your music player, removing features based on secret negotiations, long after you've made your purchases. Apple will even force "updates" on you that remove features that you've chosen to add to your device, shutting you out of listening to your own music on the player you shelled out good money for.

The problem is that once your device vendor sells you out to the studios, they're 0wned. The studios' protection racket lets them demand practically anything from a device vendor -- check out "selectable output control" for some truly heinous world-domination horseshit.

So, Chris, that's why I disagree with your "realistic" notion:

There's no reason to believe that DRM makes more content available

There's no reason to let the studios "call the shots" -- we haven't before this

There's no reason to believe that DRM makes media cheaper, quite the contrary

The features that make your "reasonable" DRM palatable to the market today can and are rescinded tomorrow

If I were in Chris's seat, I would be sure that every single review of a DRM device carried the following notice: WARNING: THIS DEVICE'S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD'S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE -- BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY'RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT'LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS. Link

https://boingboing.net/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wir.html

[archivedatl]

AP web exclusive: All Time Low tour diary

Posted by Scott Heisel on 08-Dec-06 @ 04:43 PM

Last month, Baltimore pop-punkers All Time Low took to the road with Sugarcult for a series of shows on the West Coast. Here's some of what they saw, in words and pictures. Learn more at www.alltimelow.com.

#1------------------------------------------------------------ Ooohooo So last night we celebrated two awesome occasions...well 3 since matt's molars finally grew in...anyways yesterday was Haloween and our first night of our tour with Sugarcult. I must say, it is pretty strange touring with a band who I spent the better years of my middle school life watching on MTV. Regardless of where this band has been, it definetly didn't eff with their personalities. They were all super nice to us and each came up and introduced themselves. The show went pretty well but it wasn't a good judgement of our the whole tour is going to be because Sugarcult didn't even headline, the Eagles Of Death Metal did, and the tickets for $25 on Haloween night :) I'm sorry but I would never go to a show if those were the circumstances...I'd be out expanding my collection of holiday treats. Tonight the 'real' tour begins so we will see how it goes. We are playing Washington State University in Pullman Washington. We haven't done too many college shows, so this should be interesting...anyways before we got on the road a couple days ago we were couped up in Ben Harper's (formely of yellowcard, now in amber pacific) house/studio in long beach, CA working on our new CD :). We demoed some hot licks that were going to send over to our producer matt squire so that he can put in some input. I heard my blogs are going to be posted on the Alternative Press website for this tour, so if that's the case then...helll yeah! Well I just woke up from sleeping in the van so I am gonna walk out into the freezing streets of Pullman, WA crack my back and grab some Qudoba. Much Love, Jack --jbstar #2------------------------------------------------------------ Yoo dooodds, So I'm gonna update you guys on the passed couple shows...on Wednsday we played Washington State University. Those kids are freaking crazy! Everyone seemed to be having a good time and we made some awesome new friends. I cannot stress enough, how cool the Sugarcult guys are. Which is really cool because I have been listening to those guys since 6th grade! Anyways before we played, matt thought it would be a good idea to have a fork and knife fight backstage...yeah it turned pretty ugly and we should have some footage online soon enough. That night we partied at 'The Christmas House'. Lets just say that I'm pretty sure alex made out with a dog...I really miss Hit The Lights :( Anways...we played Seattle after the college show and it was offf the hoooook. Everyone in the room was dancing and it got pretty redic. As soon as we told them the alex/dog story they went nuts. We met up with the Pink Spiders that night. We were nervous about that because we've heard some stuff...but for real those guys are the shit. There all super nice and we have no complaints about them. We have yet to tour with a band who we don't get along with (fingers crossed). We also heard that we may be doing a few shows with Cobra Starship in Dec, if that happends that would be sick. I'll keep you guys updated. Someone made us a bucket of the craziest donuts ive ever seen at the portland show last night!! They were reallly good. Sorry for the lack of pics, I'll make sure my next post has more, its just hard to take good pics on a sidekick :). Talk to you guys soon!!Jacko #3------------------------------------------------------------ Yo Babaayyss, Last nights show was off the hook! I love playing at The Boardwalk in orangevale calii. The crowd was as wild as usual and a bunch of kids were singing along. A lot of the same kids who saw us there on the Amber Pacific tour came back. Its always cool to see so many familiar faces,,,cough cough hint hint nudge...you get the idea folks! The next couple shows should be interesting...reno and vegas. I wont be able to gamble but at least ill be able to look at a lot of lights. We all have family comming out, so that should be exciting. I havent seen my brother and sister in ages and i know their gonna be wasted so that means they will be even more friendly :) Also Meg n Dia join up in vegas which is sick, SO SIKED FOR THAT!!! We met them on warped and their super nice. anyways i think its time, i go to In and Out because after this tour im not going to be able to go back for a while :( im going to eat there everyday twice a day until we leave Arizona. Ive attached pics from our set on the Epitaph stage at this years Bamboozle Left and also some pics of our acoustic set the 2nd day! Thanks to everyone who watched us either/both days :) love you peace peace n a bottle o' hair grease, jack #4------------------------------------------------------------ Wow...vegas has to be one of the strangest places on this earth. First of all we showed up in Reno (shity city) only to find that only sugarcults crew was there and the show probably wasnt going on. We were welcomed by a hooker in a pink tanktop and no teeth asking if we had any shirts we could give her...Thankfully we have power windows and middle fingers. Thankfully zack was asleep or he might have took her up on some of her offers...he's getting desperate you know..just kidding! Anyways we decided to hang out with sugarcults crew for a little then start the drive to vegas early since it was 8 house. We got to go over the Hoover Damn which was sweet. It's seriously Vegas Vacation all over again! Anyways, we got to vegas around midnight and it was a fantastic site! My bro and sis were staying at the MGM so thats where i headed. Rian to the Excalibur, Alex and Matt to the Venecian and Zack to the Luxor. We all split up and hung out with our fam for the evening. My brother took me around vegas and boyyy was it interesting. I was approached by numerous drunk people. It was basically like an Ocean City, Maryland for older people. It's just a place for adults to drink, walk around drunk, act like teenagers and maybe gamble a bit here n' there. it was Akward to say the least. Anyways the next day was the show at the House Of Blues at Mandalay Bay...probably one of the nicest venues we have ever played. We introduced ourselves to the Meg n Dia folks and got to know our new tour mates as we shared a dressing room. We soon found they are awesome people and they share a love for getting wild! The show was pretty cool, and the crowd was big. It was weird though because the merch was not in the venue, it was in the cassino haha. Anyways Vegas was an experience we wont forget, and I cant wait till we go there again. I hope the next time we go, were 21...actually nevermind because that would be three years :)stay rad, Jack #5------------------------------------------------------------ Lame! Tonight was our last show on the Sugarcult Tour featuring The Pink Spiders and Meg n Dia :( Damone will be taking our place on this great lineup. I am jelous that they get to join up! Anyways we made some lifetime friends on this tour and it was a great experience for everyone. Every single show was amazing and the fans never let us down. Traveling to bumfuck arizona and hearing a couple hundred kids sing your song is the coolest feeling ever. Sugarcult was very warming towards us and their personalities suprised the shit out of me. they were such cool guys and even when zack was sick they made him soup and gave him Emergen-C. WHO DOES THAT !?!? Thats like something my mom does...so in a way Sugarcult are our parents. They actually reffered to us as their younger brothers on stage. At the last show of the tour in Little Rock, Arkansas us and Meg n Dia ran on stage during "Bouncing Off the Walls" and started bouncing around and took over Tim's Guitar n Mic, Marko's (my twin) guitar and Airens Bass. It was so fun to bro down with a band that ive been listening to since middle school haha. Alex also got to soundcheck with sugarcult at Texas AM College because tim was at the hospital taking care of his sickness (i think he had a nasty cold). It was so crazy to see alex soundcheck with a band who for the past few years have held a special spot on my ipod and in my cd player :) I attached a pic of him sound-checking for fun. At the end of the show we said our goodbyes and gave our hugs. This is'nt the end of these friendships though, only the beggining...now we head home to write a new cd. Catch us on the road in the northeast in december when we head out with Cobra Starship! Stay safe, Jack

[trendtshirtnewposts]

Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt

Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt T shirts Store Online

Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt

Hobbies and interests are a great way to pay your free time. Lots of people realize that their childhood pastimes become a more substantial curiosity about chasing a job in a associated field. This really is one particular reasons why pastimes in youngsters ought to be urged. Read more for more information on pastimes and what they must provide your family.

An incredible pastime to have is paintball. It could be really enjoyable to travel out into a wide open paintball area and have a ideal battle with your family and good friends. All you should do is get the correct equipment, say for example a reasonable paintball weapon and also the appropriate garments.

If you are reasonably good with indoors vegetation, you should consider outdoor horticulture like a hobby. The skill sets are really comparable, but you ve got any additional obstacle of obtaining to consider temperatures, levels of sunlight, as well as the sort of soil that you have around the home. It s these more levels that provide this activity a lot of degree.

If you have a pastime that requires making use of glitter, you will discover a easy answer for keeping it in order. Very first, get yourself a plastic material dish. Then, squirt that plastic-type plate with some nonstick cooking mist. For those who have any glitter that is reduce, it is going to slide correct away. This will save you far more glitter which can be used for long term assignments.

Take into account starting up a blog about what ever your own passion is. Writing about an issue that pulls your focus in your free time is a great way to enjoy it even more. You can even make use of it to get in touch to other fans who share your passions, equally on the internet and perhaps in person way too.

If you re a sports activities junkie, take into consideration gathering memorabilia as being a interest. You will find a variety of cool things you can pick up out of your favorite sporting activities teams. Some could be antiques (like aged baseball charge cards), while others could be very present day (just like your favored player s fake jersey). It s an exciting way to show your enthusiasm!

You are able to consume piece of art when your interest. You could laugh and believe that that s off of the desk as you shortage sketching skills. However, you don t require to turn into a surrealist painter. You possibly can make abstract art or use a mixture of paints to generate exciting collages. No reason to protect yourself from piece of art because put figures master your sketchbook.

Seashell accumulating is a good pastime that can provide happy thoughts of beach front holidays. Seashells may be academic for children and in addition are actually excellent elaborate accents for your home.

As you have seen, hobbies can vary from your basic moving passions or is an all consuming enthusiasm. They may be used to convey imagination or could be molded right into a worthwhile company that will make positive changes to daily life. If you are searching to get a g=interest that meets your pursuits and abilities, keep reading under.

Fun t-shirts, hoodies and tank tops updated with new designs every week Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt. Have you completed shopping on the web? Then, it is likely you recognize that despite the fact that there are numerous commonalities to traditional store shopping, there are many distinctions also. As a result, you should be well-informed about the procedure so you can get the perfect offers. Check out this article for superb assistance that can help you within your on-line-store shopping projects. By no means attempt to retail outlet from a link a person delivered you inside an email, unless it’s a well regarded and reputed site, like Amazon online.com. Way too many shoppers get tricked into ripoffs by way of backlinks in doubtful email messages. Visit the Web address from the site mentioned from the snail mail, instead of clicking the link by itself. Speak to your buddies with regards to their favorite web stores. There are many web sites around, and there is not any way you can see them all oneself. Speak to individuals you realize to determine who the reliable internet vendors are, and exactly where they love to purchase. This can help you save a lot of time as well as. If you are creating any purchases on the web and you must come up with a user bank account, never use the exact same security passwords that you employ on other web sites. Usually do not utilize your e-mail or consumer banking password to help make your account to buy footwear from the website retailer. If someone surely could see this password, they can have access to not just your user profile on the retailer’s shop. If you need the most effective deals, look at signing up to the news letters provided on your favorite shops. Many stores provide valuable reductions in price for new associates. Numerous stores also provide wonderful financial savings to returning customers. There is lots to learn when it comes to internet shopping. You should not just start buying without the need of studying some crucial tips and tricks into it. Be sure you cautiously read through more than this informative article well before shopping to be able to save as much as possible and enjoy the greatest practical experience.

Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt, Hoodie, V-Neck, Sweater, Longsleeve, Tank Top, Bella Flowy and Unisex, T-Shirt

Classic Ladies

Hoodie

Unisex

Buy Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt

Funny Great and Tees Tshirts For WOMEN AND MEN Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt. At present, locating time to go to a actual retailer as a way to go shopping is actually difficult. With your busy life, you often wait getting points that you desire. Shopping online is a terrific way to save time and then make vital purchases. You might find out some terrific information that can assist your online buying endeavours. Never ever attempt to store from the link a person delivered you in an email, except if it’s a well regarded and reputed web site, like Amazon online marketplace.com. Lots of consumers get tricked into scams through hyperlinks in questionable email messages. Visit the URL of your web site mentioned within the email, as opposed to visiting the link itself. A reputable on-line owner must have a historical past that is saved with the Greater Enterprise Bureau. Consult with the BBB prior to component with your hard earned dollars to see if we have seen any key or regular problems lodged from them. You don’t wish to be expending cash with an organization that fails to provide. If you are looking to find the best vouchers, think about signing up for the publications from the retailers that you love the most. Many stores supply important reductions in price for new members. These stores will continue to offer special offers to their loyal consumers. This will result to important price savings with time. Constantly save replicates of the orders placed and invoices from on the web transactions. Numerous retailers will redirect you to a page soon after you’ve submitted an order outlining exactly what was purchased, client details, the costs, and so on. You should sometimes print a copy on this or help save a copy to the pc in the event any troubles come up ahead of the end of the return time. Make sure to help save any emails relating to your items’ standing or correspondence with all the company regarding your purchases, as well. There’s absolutely no reason to never take advantage of online shopping. Very low rates and even shipping free of charge is available to you. Whenever you try these tips, you will persistently reduce costs with online buying. A Cheap T shirts Store Online Shopping – Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt Product. A Trending at TrendTshirtNew, we’re about more than t-shirts!

Tattoo girl yoga eff you see kay why oh you shirt trendtshirtnew@gmail.com

source https://trendtshirtnew.com/product/tattoo-girl-yoga-eff-you-see-kay-why-oh-you-shirt/

[simplypsd1]

Being on the Safe Side of Being Online

Oh, the world wide web, how fascinating our lives have been with it! It has opened is to a whole new dimension of information we have no access to before. But then, just like any other place that’s worth exploring, there may be dangers that lurk on the sides that if you fall victim to, will damage your entire experience. So, you need to be aware of these hazards and keep yourself safe when surfing online. What’s great is that you don’t really need to be a computer science genius to know how to amply protect yourself when exploring the internet. Minimize your risk by taking note of these tips to enjoy a safer web experience.

The Importance of Upgrading

Let’s admit it: Most, if not all of us, get annoyed when programs in our computer get upgraded without our permission. These silent upgrades are not done for no reason, though, as they play a key role in keeping everyone safe. Moreover, browsers and OSes have made it point to roll out their updates in a seamless fashion, making it a point to not bother users. It would be best to apply these updates on all applications and programs, not just on your browser or frequently used programs. Don’t allow old versions of programs to be left in your machine, as they are susceptible to attacks, not to mention that they may soon (or may have already) be without support.

Silent upgrades might occasionally be annoying (and costly), but they’re a big part of keeping you safe, which is why the updates for most OSes and browsers now happen seamlessly. Apply updates whenever you’re asked to on all your applications, not just your browser, and be wary of leaving older hardware gathering dust on your network.

Viruses and malware are constantly evolving to exploit vulnerabilities in your software and hardware. Software developers try to fix these flaws as soon as they are discovered. What many people don’t realise is that infections occur because people delay software updates that fix these flaws. In short, they could have protected themselves by installing the updates to fix the security holes as soon as they came out.

(Via: https://www.necl-it.co.uk/2019/03/08/the-importance-of-keeping-software-up-to-date/)

That Required Two-Step Verification

Users are pretty much exposed to two-step verification, with most tech firms giving users the option to set it up on their accounts. What it is, basically, is that users can have an SMS or code to supplement their usernames and passwords every time they log in on a new device. Google and Microsoft highly encourage two-step verification, while for Mac users, they call it 2FA, or 2 Factor Authentication. There’s a slight difference in the process but the overall idea is the same.

Two-factor authentication (usually abbreviated 2FA) is a way to prove that you actually are the owner of a particular account by providing two “factors” of evidence. One factor is a piece of knowledge—your password or PIN, for instance. Another factor may be possession of a particular object—a phone that receives texts sent to a certain number, a USB key fob, or access to an email address. A another factor may be inheritance—something inherent to you, like your fingerprint or a retinal scan.

(Via: https://www.macworld.com/article/3520993/getting-started-with-2fa-secure-your-accounts-now-or-regret-it-later.html)

Is It Time for End-to-End Encryption?

End-to-end encryption is supposed to be a heaven-sent for users who want to be guaranteed privacy, as the encrypted messages they send can be read by only both receiver and sender, which means snoopers and hackers are excluded. URLs starting HTTPS and platforms that use fully encrypted messaging such as Signal and WhatsApp are enablers of end-to-end encryption. However, recent developments have revealed that it seems that government agencies have encouraged firms to abandon end-to-end encryption.

But though Apple at one time may have had plans to offer end-to-end encryption, according to a new report from Reuters the iPhone manufacturer abandoned plans to do so after receiving complaints from the FBI.

(Via: https://www.mic.com/p/apple-dropped-end-to-end-encryption-plans-for-icloud-to-appease-the-fbi-says-new-report-21734265)

Lock Your Phone for Real

If your phone doesn’t have a lock screen, you are exposing yourself to a lot of danger, as cybercriminals can get to your web browser history and social media accounts, both of which contain your most personal information. You may opt to add a fingerprint, a PIN code, or a pattern, which makes sure that unwelcome visitors or snatchers of your phone are discouraged from stealing your information.

With a little work, your Galaxy, Pixel, or OnePlus phone can be a veritable fortress, virtually impenetrable to hacks, attacks, and bad apps. So whether you’re looking for a little extra security or a complete lockdown of your phone, here’s everything you need to keep your data from falling into the wrong hands.

(Via: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3332211/secure-android-phone.html)

Don’t Rely on Public Wi-Fi

When you access public Wi-Fi, take note that a lot of other users can, too. This means that you will have to be careful of what you are sharing, what websites you go to, as other people may see it. You may consider installing VPN software if you’re fond of connecting to public Wi-Fi. But then, even of institutions like EFF say that public Wi-Fi isn’t that dangerous anymore, you should take this with a grain of salt.

However, starting in 2010 that all changed. Eric Butler released Firesheep, an easy-to-use demonstration of “sniffing” insecure HTTP to take over people’s accounts. Site owners started to take note and realized they needed to implement HTTPS (the more secure, encrypted version of HTTP) for every page on their site. The timing was good: earlier that year, Google had turned on HTTPS by default for all Gmail users and reported that the costs to do so were quite low. Hardware and software had advanced to the point where encrypting web browsing was easy and cheap.

(Via: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/why-public-wi-fi-lot-safer-you-think/)

But then, no matter what safety precautions you can adapt to make your web experience safer and more private, incidences like hacking may still occur, causing data loss. But don’t worry – we have you covered. Click here to know how we can help you recover your files.

Being on the Safe Side of Being Online was first published on Hard Drive Recovery Associates

from Hard Drive Recovery Associates - Feed

Being on the Safe Side of Being Online was originally seen on SimplyPSD.com Blog

from https://www.simplypsd.com/2020/03/being-on-the-safe-side-of-being-online/

[sheminecrafts]

A brief history of Facebook’s privacy hostility ahead of Zuckerberg’s testimony

The Facebook founder will be questioned by the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees later today — in a session entitled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data.”

Mark Zuckerberg is also due to testify before Congress on Wednesday — to be asked about the company’s use and protection of user data.

As we’ve pointed out already, his written testimony is pretty selective and self-serving in terms of what he does and doesn’t include in his version of events.

Indeed, in the face of the snowballing Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, the company’s leadership (see also: Sheryl Sandberg) has been quick to try to spin an idea that it was simply too “idealistic and optimistic” — and that ‘bad actors’ exploited its surfeit of goodwill.

This of course is pure fiction.

Facebook’s long history of privacy hostility should make that plain to any thinking person. As former FTC director David Vladeck wrote earlier this month: “Facebook can’t claim to be clueless about how this happened. The FTC consent decree put Facebook on notice.”

To be clear, that’s the 2011 FTC consent decree — ergo, a major regulatory privacy sanction that Facebook incurred well over six years ago.

Every Facebook privacy screw up since is either carelessness or intention.

Vladeck’s view is that Facebook’s actions were indeed calculated. “All of Facebook’s actions were calculated and deliberate, integral to the company’s business model, and at odds with the company’s claims about privacy and its corporate values,” he argues.

So we thought it would be helpful to compile an alternative timeline ahead of Zuckerberg’s verbal testimony, highlighting some curious details related to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal — such as why Facebook hired (and apparently still employs) the co-director of the company that built the personality quiz app that “improperly shared” so much Facebook data with the controversial company — as well as detailing some of its other major privacy missteps over the years.

There are A LOT of these so forgive us if we’ve missed anything — and feel free to put any additions in the comments.

  Facebook: An alternative timeline

February 2004 — Facebook is launched by Harvard College student Mark Zuckerberg

September 2006 — Facebook launches News Feed, broadcasting the personal details of Facebook users — including relationship changes — without their knowledge or consent. Scores of users protest at the sudden privacy intrusion. Facebook goes on to concede: “We really messed this one up… we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them.”

November 2007 — Facebook launches a program called Beacon, injecting personal information such as users’ online purchases and video rentals on third party sites into the News Feed without their knowledge or consent. There’s another massive outcry — and a class action lawsuit is filed. Facebook eventually pays $9.5M to settle the lawsuit. It finally shutters the controversial program in 2009

May 2008 — a complaint is filed with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada concerning the “unnecessary and non-consensual collection and use of personal information by Facebook”. The following year the company is found to be “in contravention” of the country’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Facebook is told to make changes to its privacy policy and tools — but the Commissioner is still expressing concerns at the end of 2009

February 2009 — Facebook revises its terms of service to state that users can’t delete their data when they leave the service and there’s another outcry. Backpeddling furiously in a subsequent conference call, Zuckerberg says: “We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did”

November & December 2009 — Facebook again revises its privacy policy and the privacy settings for users and now, in a fell swoop, it makes a range of personal information public by default — available for indexing on the public web. We describe this as a privacy fiasco. Blogging critically about the company’s actions, the EFF also warns: “Major privacy settings are now set to share with everyone by default, in some cases without any user choice”

December 2009 — a complaint (and supplementary complaint) is filed by EPIC with the FTC about Facebook’s privacy settings and privacy policy, with the coalition of privacy groups asserting these are inconsistent with the site’s information sharing practices, and that Facebook is misleading users into believing they can still maintain control over their personal information. The FTC later writes a letter saying the complaint “raises issues of particular interest for us at this time”

April 2010 — four senators call on Facebook to change its policies after it announces a product called Instant Personalization — which automatically hands over some user data to certain third-party sites as soon as a person visits them. The feature has an opt-out but Facebook users are default opted in. “[T]his class of information now includes significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them,�� the senators warn

May 2010 — following another user backlash against settings changes Facebook makes changes to its privacy controls yet again. “We’re really going to try not to have another backlash,” says Facebook’s VP of product Chris Cox. “If people say they want their stuff to be visible to friends only, it will apply to that stuff going forward”

May 2010 — EPIC complains again to the FTC, requesting an investigation. The watchdog quietly begins an investigation the following year

May 2010 — Facebook along with games developer Zynga is reported to the Norwegian data protection agency. The complaint focuses on app permissions, with the Consumer Council warning about “unreasonable and unbalanced terms and conditions”, and how Facebook users are unwittingly granting permission for personal data and content to be sold on

June 2011 — EPIC files another complaint to the FTC, focused on Facebook’s use of facial recognition technology to automatically tag users in photos uploaded to its platform

August 2011 — lawyer and privacy campaigner Max Schrems files a complaint against Facebook Ireland flagging its app permissions data sinkhole. “Facebook Ireland could not answer me which applications have accessed my personal data and which of my friends have allowed them to do so,” he writes. “Therefore there is practically no way how I could ever find out if a developer of an application has misused data it got from Facebook Ireland in some way”

November 2011 — Facebook settles an eight-count FTC complaint over deceptive privacy practices, agreeing to make changes opt-in going forward and to gain express consent from users to any future changes. It must also submit to privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years; bar access to content on deactivated accounts; and avoid misrepresenting the privacy or security of user data. The settlement with the FTC is finalized the following year. Facebook is not fined

December 2011 — Facebook agrees to make some changes to how it operates internationally following Schrems’ complaint leading to an audit of its operations by the Irish Data Protection Commission

September 2012 — Facebook turns off an automatic facial recognition feature in Europe following another audit by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission. The privacy watchdog also recommends Facebook tightens app permissions on its platform, including to close down developers’ access to friends data

May 2014 — Facebook finally announces at its developer conference that it will be shutting down an API that let developers harvest users’ friends data without their knowledge or consent, initially for new developer users — giving existing developers a year-long window to continue sucking this data

May 2014 — Facebook only now switches off the public default for users’ photos and status updates, setting default visibility to ‘friends’

May 2014 — Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan runs a pilot of a personality test app (called thisisyourdigitallife) on Facebook’s platform with around 10,000 users. His company, GSR, then signs a data-licensing contract with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, in June 2014, to supply it with psychological profiles linked to US voters. Over the summer of 2014 the app is downloaded by around 270,000 Facebook users and ends up harvesting personal information on as many as 87 million people — the vast majority of whom would have not known or consented to data being passed

June 2014 — Facebook data scientists publish a study detailing the results of an experiment on nearly 700,000 users to determine whether showing them more positive or negative sentiment posts in the News Feed would affect their happiness levels (as deduced by what they posted). Consent had not been obtained from the Facebook users whose emotions were being experimenting on

February 2015 — a highly critical report by Belgium’s data watchdog examining another updated Facebook privacy policy asserts the company is breaching EU privacy law including by failing to obtain valid consent from users for processing their data

May 2015 — Facebook finally shutters its friends API for existing developers such as Kogan — but he has already been able to use this to suck out and pass on a massive cache of Facebook data to Cambridge Analytica

June 2015 — the Belgian privacy watchdog files a lawsuit against Facebook over the tracking of non-users via social plugins. Months later the court agrees. Facebook says it will appeal

November 2015 — Facebook hires Joseph Chancellor, the other founding director of GSR, to work as a quantitative social psychologist. Chancellor is still listed as a UX researcher at Facebook Research

December 2015 — the Guardian publishes a story detailing how the Ted Cruz campaign had paid UK academics to gather psychological profiles about the US electorate using “a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey”. After the story is published Facebook tells the newspaper it is “carefully investigating this situation” regarding the Cruz campaign

February 2016 — the French data watchdog files a formal order against Facebook, including for tracking web browsing habits and collecting sensitive user data such as political views without explicit consent

August 2016 — Facebook-owned WhatsApp announces a major privacy U-turn, saying it will start sharing user data with its parent company — including for marketing and ad targeting purposes. It offers a time-bound opt-out for the data-sharing but pushes a pre-ticked opt-in consent screen to users

November 2016 — facing the ire of regulators in Europe Facebook agrees to suspend some of the data-sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook (this regional ‘pause’ continues to this day). The following year the French data watchdog also puts the company on formal warning that data transfers it is nonetheless carrying out — for ‘business intelligence’ purposes — still lack a legal basis

November 2016 — Zuckerberg describes the idea that fake news on Facebook’s platform could have influenced the outcome of the US election as “a pretty crazy idea” — a comment he later describes as flippant and a mistake

May 2017 –– Facebook is fined $122M in Europe for providing “incorrect or misleading” information to competition regulators who cleared its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp. It had told them it could not automatically match user accounts between the two platforms, but two years later announced it would indeed be linking accounts

September 2017 — Facebook is fined $1.4M by Spain’s data watchdog, including for collecting data on users ideology and tracking web browsing habits without obtaining adequate consent. Facebook says it will appeal

October 2017 — Facebook says Russian disinformation distributed via its platform may have reached as many as 126 million Facebook users — upping previous estimates of the reach of ‘fake news��. It also agrees to release the Russian ads to Congress, but refuses to make them public

February 2018 — Belgian courts again rule Facebook’s tracking of non-users is illegal. The company keeps appealing

March 2018 — the Guardian and New York Times publish fresh revelations, based on interviews with former Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie, suggesting as many as 50M Facebook users might have had their information passed to Cambridge Analytica without their knowledge or consent. Facebook confirms 270,000 people downloaded Kogan’s app. It also finally suspends the account of Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate, SCL, as well as the accounts of Kogan and Wylie

March 21, 2018 — Zuckerberg gives his first response to the revelations about how much Facebook user data was passed to Cambridge Analytica — but omits to explain why the company delayed investigating

March 2018 — the FTC confirms it is (re)investigating Facebook’s privacy practices in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the company’s prior settlement. Facebook also faces a growing number of lawsuits

March 2018 — Facebook outs new privacy controls, as part of its compliance with the EU’s incoming GDPR framework, consolidating settings from 20 screens to just one. However it will not confirm whether all privacy changes will apply for all Facebook users — leading to a coalition of consumer groups to call for a firm commitment from the company to make the new standard its baseline for all services

April 2018 — Facebook also reveals that somewhere between 1BN and 2BN users have had their public Facebook information scraped via a now disabled feature which allowed people to look up users by inputting a phone number or email. The company says it discovered the feature was abused by “malicious actors”, writing: “Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way”

April 2018 — the UK’s data watchdog confirms Facebook is one of 30 companies it’s investigating as part of an almost year-long probe into the use of personal data and analytics for political targeting

April 2018 — Facebook announces it has shut down a swathe of Russian troll farm accounts

April 2018 — Zuckerberg agrees to give testimony in front of US politicians — but continues to ignore calls to appear before UK politicians to answer questions about the role of fake news on its platform and the potential use of Facebook data in the UK’s Brexit referendum

April 2018 — the Canadian and British Columbian privacy watchdogs announce they are combining existing investigations into Facebook and a local data firm, AggregateIQ, which has been linked to Cambridge Analytica. The next day Facebook reportedly suspends AggregateIQ‘s account on its platform

April 2018 — Facebook says it has started telling affected users whether their information was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2GM46Kh via IFTTT

[margarette5178-blog]

Though Bitcoin Adds Mining And A Shared

GoldVu is just at present the main source of specific data regarding BullionCoin previous to its launch. By offering training specific to the type of job they select, the volunteer organizations across the country can increase the number of first responders they have available to handle conditions. Now we've Ethereum, Bitcoin, Gridcoin, Mastercoin, Auroracoin, Titcoin, amongst others. Now I don't think that a gold backed Bitcoin can be coming. The RSI is now round 52 so we can nonetheless see the worth reach higher ranges because the bullish wave seems not to be over. At the value right now, I do see some worth presenting itself and can seemingly pull the set off to average down extra when it hit the value I have in my thoughts. This creates a very intimate connection between the price of certain cryptocurrencies and the massive multi-trillion greenback gold market. "Bitcoin Gold will present a possibility for numerous new individuals world wide to take part in the mining process," the group declares. I didn't begin mining as a result of I saw it as a scheme to get wealthy.

Check out the other screen pictures to get a way of asking the correct query first adopted by a letter or letters of your selection. Where do they get their funding? $A hundred and so they accept a wide range of funding strategies including credit playing cards, debit cards, PayPal, Moneybookers (Skrill), Neteller, Webmoney and more gives a leverage of 10:1 for Bitcoins, because the digital forex is taken into account a very risky asset. The adopters of the Bitcoin News aren't pioneers of a new currency. Bitcoin doesn't discriminate against anybody resulting from their background. Stop calling ethereum "the bitcoin rival". and this may create an executable file within the bitcoin folder that will run bitcoin-qt. But because bitcoin has no mechanism for this form of relief, it's possible that the financial principle underpinning it's going to come back to haunt it. How far will it slide again? What Coinbase implemented is a pleasant step in the best path, but it is far from a complete solution. Some platforms supply up to 100x or even 500x leverage. Providers fees from web hosting service providers could be related to the extent of visitors that could be emerging to your site.

Foreign currencies might differ derived from certainly one of degree to the subsequent. Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that secure their networks utilizing cryptography. The audits are coming. BITCOIN prices are surging to an all time excessive within the wake of being approved for the futures market. As bitcoin costs continued to decline in an ever-changing scenario, traders had the worst summer. After a bumpy roll-out and widespread criticism concerning the project’s supposed secrecy, Bitcoin Gold’s improvement team has taken to day by day updates in an effort to help push the undertaking along. It's a pc that converts electricity into Bitcoin and produces some heat. In one other piece of research, myself and two co-authors are presently taking a look at empirical dynamic and fractal properties of Bitcoin. But a CNBC survey this week found that 80 percent of Wall Road economists and market strategists consider the rise in worth of Bitcoin to be a bubble. Fb has said it's going to introduce instruments to forestall faux information stories from spreading on its platform.

Investing in silver bullion is extremely much like investing in gold bullion so the identical principles will apply. They tend to view gold as an old school currency various. We are all aware the definition of currency. Irrespective of which currency you attempt to store, it has that inflation impact on it. But BCH of us are more flexible and another change of the block size or one thing like that may most likely be enough to unravel such a situation. =2.5A of current in order to produce enough power if 5 miners are related. If the payment channels are open for an extended period of time, lots of people could begin to operate solely within the network. As a result of when the fork happens, everyone will get free coins on the offshoot community - no matter they would identify it. This formal endorsement makes the buying and selling of collectible coins simple. I'll be transparent with this as a result of I consider there's all the time one thing which I might learnt about from this train. This is going to escalate. Within the midst of these discouraging activities, however, a number of social-platform successes have occurred that garnered much less attention, such as the "Umbrella Revolution" in Hong Kong or Kenya's Election Hub.

First - what's a miner actually? If you find yourself investing for the lengthy haul, and need to turn out to be profitable. To me, this math underlies the waves which can be expressed in social upheavals, and finally into wars. I want to handle some of the feedback made before returning to our usually scheduled programming. In addition, the EFF stated that it does not usually present endorsements for any companies or merchandise. How Can Cryptocurrency be used for Cash Laundering? In any case, you can’t expect your babies to remain in diapers and strut around in walkers for the rest of their lives, can you? Must you be committed to earning money online, you should be subsequent blogs on the topic. For asset play, persistence is required. SCC's committee on "Blockchain and digital distributed ledger technologies". . You could find a comprehensive itemizing of these privacy policies and their links right here: Privateness Coverage Links. Uniblue relies in Malta and assist is provided from there.

[anderwhohn]

Made some adjustments to the Mass Effect muse lineup in terms of activity levels. As always, these are subject to change as muse for these characters fluctuate over time.

PRIMARY MUSES - MASS EFFECT

Isabela Shepard

Sara Ryder

SECONDARY MUSES - MASS EFFECT

Jeff "Joker" Moreau

Tali'Zorah

Garrus Vakarian

Nihlus Kryik

TERTIARY MUSES - MASS EFFECT

Urdnot Wrex

Mordin Solus

Thane Krios

Jack | Subject Zero

James Vega

Javik

Dr. Karin Chakwas

[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

D-Blog Week: The CGM New Girl Spills All...

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/d-blog-week-the-cgm-new-girl-spills-all/

D-Blog Week: The CGM New Girl Spills All...

Blood drops are red, diabetes circles are blue...

OK, we aren't the best poets in the Diabetes Community. And since it's Poetry Tuesday on this second day of Diabetes Blog Week 2014, we've decided to cash in a Wildcard chip instead, and take on the topic: Tell Me a Story.

Write a short story personifying a diabetes tool you use on a daily basis. A meter, syringe, pump, pill, etc. Give it a personality and a name and let it speak through you. What would it be happy about, upset about, mad about?

We're happy to let our weekly Q&A columnist and fellow type 1 Wil Dubois -- with his own unique and snarky style -- take the lead on this one. You may remember that back in 2005, Wil was one of the first 30 people with diabetes ever in the U.S. to start using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). Back then, he referred to his new gadget as "The Girl."

A lot has changed on the CGM scene in years since, so today we'll hear updates from Wil's "New Girl," who's speaking out for the first time about what their relationship is really like.

My G4: Her Side of the Story

Wil is such an a##hole. Oh yes, everybody thinks he's so kind and so knowledgeable, and so dedicated, etc. It makes me want to scream. Or throw up. Or both.

Let me tell you what he's really like. He's ungrateful as hell. I mean, I've watched over him all day every day—and every night—since I moved in with him. No kidding, I literally check his blood sugar every five minutes. You'd think he'd be grateful. You'd think he'd thank me. But noooooooo. He ignores me unless I demand his attention.

Do you know that he actually hides me in his pocket so other people can't see me? That makes me M-A-D, mad! I know he used to show off his previous CGMs. Those girls got to ride on his belt. So what the 'eff is wrong with me? I'm prettier than they were. I'm thin. I have nice curves. I have blue eyes... uh... I mean a blue case. I bet a lot of boys, especially those without insurance, would love to date me. It would serve Wil right if I left him for another diabetic!

Of course, I won't. I'm just venting. For some reason I can't calculate, I love the big lug. But life with Wil isn't easy. Hell, just yesterday he actually threw me in the laundry hamper. Can you believe that? That's domestic abuse, I tell you. Why, I could have been washed! I'm not waterproof, so it could have killed me! I had to scream and scream and scream before his little boy finally rescued me. And did Wil even bother to apologize to me? No! Oh, he thanked his son profusely for coming to my aid, but no "sorry," or "don't worry, it will never happen again" to ME! For a guy who's supposed to have such a kind heart, he sure doesn't treat his machines well.

Actually... now that I think about his relationship with the rest of us in the household, maybe I should consider myself lucky. He ignores me, but the poor computer... he actually shouts at her. A lot. And it's not her fault he doesn't know how to push her buttons and stroke her software right. And the phone, why that girl gets left behind as often as he takes her out, and I can't count how many times he's let her batteries die.

So I guess none of us are getting what we think we deserve, but, come on, I'm a pretty low-maintenance kinda gal. I just need two fingersticks a day and some juice from the wall or the computer about once a week. Maybe a download, you know, on special occasions. And it would be nice if he cleaned those greasy fingerprints off of my screen now and then. Personally, I don't think I'm asking for much. His ex's asked for much more. And they got it.

Not that I'm jealous.

Oh, hell, who am I kidding? I'm as jealous as hell! I'm the best friggin' thing that's ever happened to him, and he treats me like dirt! The other girls got to sleep with him. I know this to be true, because I've read about it in his blog. But me? I have to sleep with that skank iPod on the night stand, along with the insulin pen and that cheap meter of his. Relegated to the cold, hard nightstand; or hidden in his pocket. It's not fair.

Oh, but it gets worse. I heard him on the phone talking to Dexcom just the other day. I think he might be thinking about getting a younger mistress to replace me with. What did I do to deserve that? I have been 100% reliable and faithful to him. Well, OK, there was that whole thing with the transmitter recently, but that wasn't my fault.

And that's not the end of his cruelty. I caught him looking at CGM porn online. I can't tell you how much that hurts. What more could he want? I'm accurate. I'm loud enough to wake him up. I've even got a color screen, for God's sake! I think he forgets how good he has it. It would serve him right if I "accidentally" lost telemetry with the transmitter for a few hours. Or if I gave him the "question mark treatment" like his last girl used to do. Hah! That would show him.

But... No. I couldn't bring myself to do that. He might get hurt. And even though he hurts my feelings all the time, I couldn't bring myself to do anything that might really, genuinely hurt him. I love him too much for that.

But... I could... Ha! Yes, I will. I'll give the bastard a false low alarm. That'll show him!

And I'll do it at 2:30 in the morning.

Editor's note: Apparently she did blast a false low alarm at 2:30am. But after we let Wil read what The Girl had to say, he tells us he cleaned her screen, gave her a good download, and promises to give her a good night kiss and thank her for a hard day's work every night. They're also talking about attending some couples therapy, but given Wil's track record, we're guessing next year he may be shacking up with a different one.

This is our Day 2 post for D-Blog Week, and you can see all the other takes on the various prompts throughout the week by clicking here. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #DBlogWeek. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

[anderwhohn]

REVISED CROSSOVER VERSE HANDLING:

Since most of the crossovers that aren't dealing with intergalactic space travel being a thing already (ie fandoms like Star Trek, as well as Doctor Who, simply because most muses who'd be interacting therein would be aware of aliens and space travel, even if the general population of Earth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries wouldn't be), and the majority of the crossover verses had a similar thread of "Shepard fires off the Crucible and it does some bullshit that flings her through space and time to somewhere else in the multiverse entirely," the info for all such verses is now simply under the "Crucible Bullshit" card on Izzy's verses page.

VERSE: This Could Be... Problematic [ Crucible Bullshit | Multiverse ]

This is the general 'catch all' verse for crossovers for the fandoms without specifically tailored verses. Most of the interactions within the verse will cover any fandom that takes place on Earth in the "modern era" between the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Izzy will still have some functional tech - namely her cybernetic implants and omnitool, the latter of which will allow her to painstakingly fabricate additional tech and some other supplies that she might want or need. But whether or not she will be able to return to her own century (or possibly even universe, depending on how things plan out) will largely vary on where she crash lands, because under most circumstances, she'll likely be trapped wherever she winds up, even if it takes her a long time to give up on trying to get home to her crew.

ADDITIONAL CROSSOVER VERSES:

The verses for the following fandoms have been moved as subverses of the multiverse verse. I'm still working out whether to make change the tags to "altverse au" or leave them as-is, but they all essentially share the basic principle of Shepard crash landing in another timeline/world/universe thanks to the Crucible at the ending of Mass Effect 3's Destroy Ending.

Our Flag Means Death [New AU]

Assassin's Creed

Marvel

[anderwhohn]

PRIMARY MUSES

Ashina Tabris ― Highly Selective

Orabela Aeducan ― Active (Open to Anyone)

Isabela Shepard ― Active (Open to Anyone)

Kiran Brosca ― Highly Selective

Matilda ― Private (Mutuals Only)

SECONDARY MUSES

Varric Tethras ― Highly Selective

TERTIARY MUSES

Carver Hawke ― By Request Only

Dr. Karin Chakwas ― By Request Only

interest checker || open starters || memes

[neptunecreek]

Iranian Tech Users Are Getting Knocked Off the Web by Ambiguous Sanctions

Between targeted killings, retaliatory air strikes, and the shooting of a civilian passenger plane, the last few weeks have been marked by tragedy as tensions rise between the U.S. and Iranian governments. In the wake of these events, Iranians within the country and in the broader diaspora have suffered further from actions by both administrations—including violence and lethal force against protesters and internet shutdowns in Iran, as well as detention, surveillance and device seizure at the U.S. border and exacerbating economic conditions from U.S. sanctions. And to make matters worse, American tech companies are acting on sanctions through an overbroad lens, making it much harder for Iranian people to be able to share their stories with each other and with the broader world.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions that target foreign countries, groups, and individuals. Some of these sanctions impact the export to Iran (or use by residents of the country) of certain types of technology, although trying to parse precisely which types are affected appears to have left some companies puzzled.

For example, this week Instagram removed a number of accounts from its service that were affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—which is specially designated by OFAC—as well as some accounts praising the IRGC and some condemning the group. The platform initially justified its actions stating:

We review content against our policies and our obligations to US sanctions laws, and specifically those related to the US government’s designation of the IRGC and its leadership as a terrorist organization.

While Instagram is indeed obligated to remove accounts affiliated with the IRGC, the law does not extend to unaffiliated accounts providing commentary on the IRGC—although some experts say that posts supporting a specially designated group could be seen as providing support to the group, thus violating sanctions.

In any case, Instagram may choose to remove accounts praising the IRGC under its own community standards. In the end, Instagram ended up restoring at least one account following media criticism.

A long hard road

EFF has long observed tech companies’ struggle with OFAC sanctions. In 2012, an Apple employee refused to sell a laptop to a customer who was overheard speaking Persian, prompting the State Department to issue a clarifying statement:

[T]here is no U.S. policy or law that prohibits Apple or any other company from selling products in the United States to anybody who’s intending to use the product in the United States, including somebody of Iranian descent or an Iranian citizen or any of that stuff.

In 2013, we spoke up when Airbnb booted an Iranian resident of Switzerland from their platform without recourse, resulting in a reversal of the decision.

And now, as tensions between the U.S. and Iran heat up, we’re seeing tech companies booting Iranians from their platforms left and right. For example:

Github closed the account of a computer science professor teaching at a Canadian university

GoFundMe suspended two different Canadian campaigns to raise funds for a memorial service for the crash victims of the Ukrainian airliner flight PS752

Iranians have reported being blocked from downloading the Twitter app from Google’s Play Store.

YouTube suspended the UK branch of an Iranian government-funded broadcast outlet

...But are these companies correct in stripping Iranians of their accounts? The answer: It’s complicated.

Iran is subject to certain OFAC sanctions, and in addition to that, the IRGC and certain Iranian nationals are on OFAC’s list of “specially designated nationals.” OFAC sanctions can be interpreted broadly by tech companies, which is why in 2010, the Treasury Department issued a general license intended as a blanket license for the export of “certain services and software incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet, such as instant messaging, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging, provided that such services are publicly available at no cost to the user.”

In 2014, that license was amended to include even more products, including certain fee-based services “incident to the exchange of personal communications over the Internet” including social networking. The new license, General License D-1, provided greater clarity to companies on what is and is not subject to sanctions. As the National Iranian American Council pointed out in a 2017 letter, General License D-1 has been widely praised for “securing human rights, protecting access to online information, and avoiding government censors.”

As the events of this week demonstrate, companies are still struggling to understand the rules. And understandably so—as Richard Nephew, a sanctions expert and senior research scholar at Columbia University told CNN:

[T]his is a tough gray area as we also have free speech protections too.  This is why I think companies often make mistakes in this area, both by preventing such posts or activities and by allowing them …

But while the rules might be difficult, companies are making things worse by failing to properly communicate to users about why their accounts have been suspended—and by giving misleading or incorrect statements to the media.

Why does this matter?

Sanctions that prevent the free flow of communications on the internet and hamper ordinary the ability of ordinary Iranians to express themselves often harm the very people they’re intended to help. Over the years, we’ve seen how sanctions on tech—as well as misapplication or overbroad application of such sanctions—hurt individuals from all walks of life by denying them access to information and cutting them off from communication with the rest of the world.

After the 2014 issuance of General License D-1 for Iranians, Sudanese citizens embarked on a campaign for a similar license, arguing that sanctions prevented them from accessing e-books, online courses, and other information. In a country where the government bans books and at times seizes newspapers, the knowledge that can be gained online can make all the difference. For Iranians, greater access can also mean safer access—to VPNs, secure messaging apps, and other vital tools.

But it isn’t just access to information—it’s also the information coming out of Iran that’s affected. When a Ukrainian airliner was struck down in Iranian airspace, it was video taken from inside the country—as well as efforts by individuals in Iran—that led to verification that Iran’s government had struck the plane with a missile. As we’ve pointed out before, policies intended to prevent violent extremists from using online services often have the effect of silencing human rights content. And given how little access international media has to Iran, hearing from Iranians about what’s happening on the ground is vital.

Furthermore, Iran has seen fit in the past to shut down the Internet, preventing its residents from accessing the outside world. If the U.S. government truly believes in the internet freedom policy that it continues to pour millions of dollars into, it should see how its own policies are working against freedom and pushing Iranians toward local services that are likely heavily surveilled or censored. As it stands, the U.S. is just helping Iran do the job of silencing its citizens.

A clearer way forward

As moral panic and confusion set in, more and more companies are seeking to enforce sanctions law—and as they do, it’s vital that they have the best possible information at hand so ordinary citizens aren’t unduly impacted. As such, we are reiterating our ask for the Department of Treasury to update General License D-1 and provide guidance to U.S. tech companies to ensure the minimal amount of damage to users.

But although sanctions are hard, we also call on tech companies to exercise both caution and compassion as they navigate these murky waters. Companies should ensure that they’re using the best possible means to identify potentially impacted users; notify them clearly (by providing information about specific statutes and links to relevant information from the Department of Treasury); and most importantly, provide an appeals system so that users who are wrongly identified have a path of recourse to regain access to their accounts.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2sxPUi8

[neptunecreek]

Pushing Back Against Backdoors: 2018 Year in Review

This wasn’t a great year for those of us whose job it is to defend the use of encryption.

In the United States, we heard law enforcement officials go on about the same “going dark” problem they’ve been citing since the late 90s, but even after all these years, they still can’t get basic facts straight. The National Academy of Sciences was entirely (and unsurprisingly) unhelpful. And in the courts, there was at least some action surrounding encryption, but we don’t know exactly what.

The real movement happened on the other side of the Pacific, so we’ll start there. 

The Land Down Under—Or the Upside Down?

Long-time readers of this blog will know Australia’s fraught history with attempts to regulate encryption…and math. In mid-2017, then-Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull said: “The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.” He made this laughable claim in the context of a proposed ban on end-to-end encryption in his country. Turnbull was forced from office before his luddite’s dream could become reality, but unfortunately, his dream didn’t fade as quickly as his political fortunes.

Late 2018 saw the Australian Parliament pass the Assistance and Access Act into law, with—as EFF’s Danny O’Brien put it—indecent speed and the barest nod to debate. Based in part on the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act that became law in 2016, the Assistance and Access Act isn’t an outright ban on encryption. Rather, it gives the government the power to issue secret orders to tech companies and individual technologists to re-engineer software and hardware under their control, so that it can be used to spy on their users. Incredibly, and unlike the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, this includes the power to compel individual network administrators, sysadmins, and open source developers to comply with secret demands, including potentially to force them to keep their cooperation secret from their managers, lawyers, and executive leadership.

Combined with another power claimed by the Australian government—an expanded ability to censor and filter the Internet—we can see a potential dystopic future in the Land Down Under: one where only backdoored communication tools are permitted in Australia, and all other services and protocols will face government-mandated blocking and filtering.

The only silver lining to the encryption situation in Australia is that the government hasn’t attempted to exercise its new powers…yet.

The DOJ Shoots at Messenger, and Misses

In the United States, in EFF’s own backyard in California, the Department of Justice did something to challenge the use of end-to-end encryption. We’re not exactly sure what, but the one thing we do know about the fight is that we won.

According to press reports, the DOJ tried to get a court to order Facebook to do something to enable the wiretapping of encrypted Facebook Messenger voice calls. Because the entire episode occurred under seal, we don’t know the specifics. We know that it involved an investigation into suspected MS-13 gang activity in California’s Central Valley, and the interplay between the Wiretap Act and encrypted VOIP calling. To our knowledge, this hasn’t been done before, and it raises novel questions about modern communication providers’ duties to assist with wiretaps involving encryption.

Despite the mystery surrounding the entire episode, one thing is clear: either Facebook won the court battle, or the DOJ gave up, and the court didn’t end up ordering Facebook to redesign its systems.

But we’re not going to let the DOJ’s (failed) fight remain secret if we can help it. In November, EFF—along with co-counsel at the ACLU and Stanford—moved the court to unseal and release all court orders and related materials in the sealed Messenger case. A hearing has been set for January 2019 and we’ll keep you updated on the results.

The National Academy of Sciences Didn’t Help

In February 2018, after a two-year effort, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report attempting to move the encryption debate forward by proposing a “framework for decisionmakers.” We were not impressed.

The NAS report collapsed the question of whether the government should mandate encryption backdoors with how the government could accomplish that mandate. The report barely mentioned the benefits of encryption, the civil liberties implications of a ban, or the international implications of U.S. government action in the space.

We wish that the NAS had taken it upon itself not only to inform how to implement a particular backdoor policy but whether to undertake that policy in the first place. 

The FBI Can’t Do Basic Arithmetic

In 2018, we learned that the FBI had been fundamentally misleading not only the public but also Congress in its incessant “going dark” rhetoric. For much of 2018, the Bureau had claimed that encryption prevented it from legally searching the contents of nearly 7,800 devices in 2017. But in May the Washington Post reported that the actual number is far lower.

That’s why EFF submitted a FOIA request for records related to the FBI Director’s talking points about the “7,800” unhackable phones and the FBI’s use of outside vendors to bypass encryption.

Looking Forward(?) to 2019

We’d quite obviously be lying if we told you we knew what was going to happen in the encryption debate in 2019: we’re now two years into the Trump Administration and it has yet to propose any legislation potentially affecting encryption. We’re more than two years since the UK passed its Investigatory Powers Act, and only a matter of weeks since Australia passed its equivalent Assistance and Access Act—but to our knowledge, neither country has attempted to use their new powers. 

Whatever 2019 brings, and wherever those challenges arise, you can be sure we’ll be on the front lines defending your right to use strong encryption without backdoors.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2018.

DONATE TO EFF

Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today!

from Deeplinks http://bit.ly/2AlHNWO