#technology and security

[fantastic-nonsense]

however bad of a day you're having, know that it's not nearly as bad as whatever the Crowdstrike security team is going through since waking up this morning

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Someday, we’ll all take comfort in the internet’s “dark corners”

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me on SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

Platforms decay. Tech bosses, unconstrained by competition; regulation; ad blockers and other adversarial interoperability; and their own workers, will inevitably hollow out their platforms, using ultraflexible digital technology to siphon value away from end users and business customers, leaving behind the bare minimum of value to keep all those users locked in:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

Enshittification is the inevitable result of high switching costs. Tech bosses are keenly attuned to opportunities to lock in their customers and users, because the harder is to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat you – the more value it can rob you of – without risking your departure.

But platform users are a heterogeneous, lumpy mass. Different groups of users have different switching costs. An adult Facebook user of long tenure has more reasons to stay than a younger user: they have more complex social lives, with nonoverlapping social circles from high school, college, various jobs, affinity groups, and family. They are more likely to have a chronic illness, or to be caring for someone with chronic illness, and to be a member of a social media support group they value highly. They are more likely to be connected to practical communities, like little league carpool rotas.

That's the terrible irony of platform decay: the more value you get from a platform, the more cost that platform can extract, a cost denominated in your wellbeing, enjoyment and dignity.

(At this point, someone will pipe up and say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." It's nonsense. Dignity, respect and fairness aren't frequent flier program perks that tech companies dribble out to their best customers. Companies will happily treat their paying customers as "products" if they think those customers can't avoid other forms of rent-extraction, such as "attention rents")

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Now, consider the converse proposition: for younger users, platforms deliver less value. Younger users have less complex social lives on average relative to their parents and grandparents, which means that platforms have fewer ways to sink their hooks into those young users. Further: young users tend to want things that the platforms don't want them to have, right from the first day they sign up. In particular, young users often want to conduct their socializing out of eyesight and earshot of adults, especially parents, teachers, and other authority figures. This means that a typical younger user has both more reasons to leave a platform as well as fewer reasons to stay there.

Younger people have an additional reason to bail on platforms early and often: if your online and offline social circles strongly overlap – if you see the same people at school as you do in your feed, it's much easier to reassemble your (smaller, less complex) social circle on a new platform.

And so: on average, young people like platforms less, hate them more, and have both less to lose and more to gain by leaving one platform for another. Sure, some young people are also burning with youth's neophilia. But even without that neophilia, young people are among the first to go when tech bosses start to ratchet up the enshittification.

Beyond young people, there are others who tend to jump ship early, like sex-workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Sex-workers' technology changes are only incidentally the result of some novelty-seeking impulse. The real reason to change platforms if you're a sex-worker is that the platforms are either absolutely hostile to sex-workers, or profoundly indifferent to the suffering their policy changes rain down upon them.

The same is broadly true of other disfavored groups, including those with out-of-mainstream political ideologies. Some of these groups hold progressive views, others are out-and-out Nazis, but all of them chafe at the platforms' policies at the best of times, and are far more ready to jump ship when the platforms tighten the noose on all their users.

This is where "dark corners" come in. The worst people on the internet have relocated to its so-called dark corners – privately hosted servers, groupchats, message-boards, etc. Some of these are notorious: Kiwi Farms, 4chan, 8kun, sprawling Telegram groupchats. Others only breach when they are implicated in waves of unthinkably cruel and grotesque crimes:

https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/

The answer to crimes committed in the internet's dark corners is the same as for crimes committed anywhere: catch the criminals, prosecute the crimes. But a distressing number of well-meaning people observe the nexus between dark corners and the crimes that fester there, and conclude that the problem is with the dark corners, themselves.

These people observe that social media platforms like Facebook, and intermediaries like Cloudflare, DNS providers, and domain registrars constitute a "nexus of control" – chokepoints that trap the online lives of billions of people – and conclude that these gigantic corporations can and should be made "responsible" for their users:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

From there, it's a short leap to conclude that anyone who isn't in a position to be controlled by these too big to jail, too big to fail, relentlessly enshittifying corporations must be pushed into their demesne.

This is a deal with the devil. In the name of preventing small groups of terrible people from gathering in private, beyond the control of the world's insufferable and cruel tech barons, we risk dooming everyone else to being permanently within those unworthy billionaires' thumbs.

This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are so eager to see an increase in "intermediary liability" rules like Section 230. Zuckerberg's greatest fear isn't having to spend more on moderators or algorithms that suppress controversial subjects:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/instagram-users-outraged-by-app-limiting-political-content-ahead-of-elections/

The thing he fears the most is losing control over his users. That's why he bought Instagram: to recapture the young users who were fleeing his mismanaged, enshittified platform in droves:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

A legal mandate for Zuckerberg to police his users is a legal requirement that he surveil and control those users. It's fundamentally incompatible with the new drive in competition circles to force Zuckerberg and his fellow tech barons to offer gateways that make it easier to escape their grasp, by allowing users to depart Facebook and continue to socialize with the users who stay behind:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Remember: the more locked-in a platform user is, the harder that platform will squeeze that user, safe in the knowledge that the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and tolerating the platform's abuse.

This is the problem with "feudal security" – the warlord who lures you into his castle fortress with the promise of protection from external threats is, in reality, operating a prison where no one can protect you from him:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

Rather than fighting to abolish dark corners because only the worst people on the internet use them today, we should be normalizing dark corners, making it easier for every kind of user to find a cozy nook that is shaded from the baleful glare of Zuck and his fellow, eminently guillotineable tech warlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/

Enshittification is relentless. The collapse of the restraints that penalized tech companies who abused their users – competition, regulation, interoperability and their own workers' consciences – has inculcated every tech boss with an incurable enshittification imperative.

Efforts to make the platforms safer for their users can only take us so far. Fundamentally, these vast, centralized systems that vest authority with flawed and mediocre and frail human dictators (who fancy themselves noble, brilliant and infallible) will never be safe for human habitation. Rather than focusing on improving the platforms, we should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

Online communities that control their own moderation policies won't always get it right. But there is a whole host of difficult moderation calls that can never be adequately handled by outsiders overseeing vast, sprawling platforms. Distinguishing friendly banter from harassment requires the context that only an insider can hope to possess.

We all deserve dark corners where we stand a chance of finding well-managed communities that can deliver the value that keeps us stuck to our decaying giant platforms. Eventually, the enshittification will chase every user off these platforms – not just kids or sex-workers or political radicals. When that happens, it sure would be nice if everyone could set up in a dark corner of their own.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

[sangu1vore]

weird girl i met at a pizzeria

[mochimellowd]

Oh youtube recommendations are being extra cheeky today huh

[sixth-light]

https://x.com/csoandy/status/1814252032884146636

good commentary on the crowdstrike incident

Yes, this is good technical commentary. It's noticeable that different companies have had very different levels of difficulty managing the incident and preparation will certainly have played a role, along with the timing and the number and distribution of systems.

For the less technical (because I've noticed some confused reblogs): Crowdstrike is an enterprise-level, i.e. for large organisations managing many computer systems, set of antivirus tools. It is very good - this is why many, many large organisations with high security needs (such as banks and airlines) use it. Since it defends against malware and viruses, its tools are constantly receiving automatic updates.

About eighteen hours ago, one of those automatic updates accidentally blue-screened Windows machines and servers worldwide that had one particular Crowdstrike tool installed. This was quickly deemed to be fixable without too much hassle, except for one really major issue: individual systems need someone with technical expertise to start them up *directly, in person* in order to be fixed. Imagine you're an airline with computers at every airport. A bank with ATMs nationwide. A retail chain with computers in every store...

Anyway, this is going to take some organisations a while to fix. It is extremely, extremely fixable! But it's gonna take a minute. And some of the orgs not directly affected are reliant on other ones which are. So yeah, soz to IT teams everywhere about their weekend.

[donutboxers]

Introduction to COLOPORT CICI TV M21THW-1 BY NUCLEAR ELECTRICS© 1967

An OC I've been developing for the past two weeks, I've been hyper-fixating about a specific 1960s portable tv by General Electrics

She has 6 available personalities and comes with her very own pet! (soon to be released)

She's heavily inspired by 60s technology and the post WWII "return to normalcy" movement and the Red Scare, she's technically just a TV but that's not necessarily what NUCLEAR ELECTRICS or the government for that matter use her for. Let's just hope her pets don't find you acting out of the ordinary...

also... i couldn't figure out how to save this drawing without the pixels becoming blurry but CSP gave me the best resolution, i drew this in Ibis Paint on my phone :) all of the words are hand-drawn because i couldn't find a single font that wouldn't become blurry at the size i wanted

here's a fun list of all the websites i found trying to make this character:

https://www.earlytelevision.org/Etzold/portacolor-d.html

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/antique-1967-ge-porto-11-color-tv-3845768543

https://clickamericana.com/topics/science-technology/how-to-enjoy-your-ge-porta-color-television-1967

https://www.cool386.com/ge_19inch/ge_19inch.html

also some cool pictures of it

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

I can't remember where Against Sustainability is from lol.

Technical Authority is in this issue of Black Seed. Everything besides this one is an excerpt from a book, so read just the excerpt or the whole book, the choice is yours.

You can read more than just the first ITS communique if you want but they get a little bit nuts later in their existence.

[webdiggerxxx]

꧁★꧂

[fly-the-pattern]

[lepitorus]

My gods I love how you draw Vanny so much (╯✧▽✧)╯

thank you!!!!!!!

[netscapenavigator-official]

The fact that Apple reportedly sells Apple TVs for $100+ and they’re STILL at a loss should tell you just how shady the smart TV market is. When you buy a Roku or a Smart TV, you’re buying a screen grabber. I’m not kidding. Most modern Smart TVs have a screen monitoring program built in to content match whatever you’re watching or playing (yes, even on external HDMI inputs) and sell that data to advertisers. The reason flat screen TVs have gotten so cheap isn’t because of production costs falling, but rather these companies selling the hardware to you at a loss, and then secretly selling your information and viewing habits to make up the difference. I’m not exaggerating. They’re are guides online on how to disable this screen grabbing software on a per TV-manufacturer basis. I highly recommend you look them up, or simply never connect your TV to the internet in the first place and deny it access to do so.

[mothman-etd]

You do cyber security type stuff, right? I think I remember Joy mentioning it on her blog. Are there any antivirus programs you recommend?

I don't specialize in Security but in my position I am suppose to know enough so that a Security Specialist is not able to bullshit me.

Honestly antiviruses are an outdated technology at this point. the provided security by Apple and Microsoft for MacOS and Windows is just as good, or the exact same, as anything you would buy over the counter. Instead you should shift your security approach to not having your computer be your point of failure, it is easy to reinstall programs, it is not easy to reproduce your files. This means embracing backups and saving your files in a drive that has version control. OneDrive is free with windows and has versioning, so if a file gets encrypted or destroyed you can roll it back to a previous state on another computer that can access your OneDrive. I believe Apple Cloud and Google Drive also have versioning. For Mac you can also enable Time Machine on an external harddrive and it will take snapshots of your drives for you, then if something happens you can roll your mac back to one of those snapshots. To test this just shut your primary computer off and try to get at all the files you want/need without turning it back on. If you cannot then you need to adjust how you save/backup those files.

This would be for personal use. For business use you can get something fancy like SentinelOne with a dedicated 24/7 SOC so you always have a human watching for any computer logs to alert suspicious activity, but those are mainly to fight against ransomware.

[hackeocafe]

The Wi-Fi Multi-Tool You Need

Wow! The WLAN Pi R4 is such a useful tool for wireless networking! It basically does everything you'd want it to do. In this video, I go over most of the features of WLAN Pi R4 and the WLAN Pi OS so that you can have a complete picture of this device's capabilities. Let's do it!

[spottedstatic]

I’m literally so hyped for genloss founders cut so have this messy drawing of Security but more animalistic I made :)

Happy one year generation loss 🎉

[black-salt-cage]

ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ♡‧₊˚

[invasionimminentz]

to my old school computer

the keys on you may get stuck

like they would if you were a neglacted piano

but this message I'm writing

i never expected to be my last

we aren't together anymore, and you're

a non-sentient piece of technology,

hurriedly assembled and slow,

made clunkily by a machine, you don't run anymore

today they'll shut you down, and you won't remember

the 27,000 documents and pictures and videos and memories

we shared together.

this is to my old school computer.

i would hold you forever, without the factory reset

that breaks six years of warmth and late nights spent together.

in another life, I could stay attached, and we would

never have to forget one another.

Update device within 19 hours. the clock winds down with a tick.

"The district requires you to update your Chromebook

before the deadline." but this update will never come

and this deadline is forever your last

even though you don't know me like I know you,

i'll miss you all the same.

maybe you're in there, and maybe you'll miss me too,

maybe you loved me like I loved you

you were a friend, and a help, a distraction

from the loud world around me. without you I am nothing.

i take a deep breath in, close your lid shakily, and mutter my

goodbye.