#the new cold war

[stillnaomi]

in the last few years:

- the US has railed against a made up a genocide in China

- had the CIA spread false stories about CPC officials acquiring secret fortunes

- run a propaganda campaign against the belt and road initiative

- and spread an anti vaxx conspiracy in the Philippines to discourage the use of Chinese vaccines

now they're trying to pass a $1.6 billion budget to spread more anti China propaganda. be ready for what's coming

[tikitania]

UPDATE: VK restored access. I had to prove that I was not a bot. Now, here's to hoping that life doesn't get in the way to watching Sleeping Beauty.

___ UGH…I’ve been blocked on VK for no apparent reason. I read that the platform is booting users with American & Canadian phone numbers, so I’m assuming that’s why. Hoping that Kokoreva’s debut in Sleeping Beauty will show up on YouTube in its entirety.

[sneeplerbeepler]

Hindus are being gangraped, lynched, and having their property destroyed in Bangladesh rn. Amidst all the news coming out of there don't forget about the minority that always ends up dealing with the brunt of chaos. in 1971 most of the victims of the genocide were Bangladeshi Hindus and everyone conveniently leaves this detail out.

(And i know some mf will either no true scotsman this or say that it's all lies and that all the videos coming out are fake or propaganda from the BJP or something instead of another event in a long chain of violence. The Hindu population has crashed from 30% at independence to 9% today. Estimates say that in the next 30 years, Hindus will be extinct in Bangladesh)

[shellshooked]

link skywalker redraw to celebrate the au that started it all🤸🏼‍♀️

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Privacy first

The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.

But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First":

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.

Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data.

Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data.

Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads.

Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat.

The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity. Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition.

America is decades behind on privacy. The last really big, broadly applicable privacy law we passed was a law banning video-store clerks from leaking your porn-rental habits to the press (Congress was worried about their own rental histories after a Supreme Court nominee's movie habits were published in the Washington City Paper):

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

In the decades since, we've gotten laws that poke around the edges of privacy, like HIPAA (for health) and COPPA (data on under-13s). Both laws are riddled with loopholes and neither is vigorously enforced:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

Privacy First starts with the idea of passing a fit-for-purpose, 21st century privacy law with real enforcement teeth (a private right of action, which lets contingency lawyers sue on your behalf for a share of the winnings):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

Here's what should be in that law:

A ban on surveillance advertising:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Data minimization: a prohibition on collecting or processing your data beyond what is strictly necessary to deliver the service you're seeking.

Strong opt-in: None of the consent theater click-throughs we suffer through today. If you don't give informed, voluntary, specific opt-in consent, the service can't collect your data. Ignoring a cookie click-through is not consent, so you can just bypass popups and know you won't be spied on.

No preemption. The commercial surveillance industry hates strong state privacy laws like the Illinois biometrics law, and they are hoping that a federal law will pre-empt all those state laws. Federal privacy law should be the floor on privacy nationwide – not the ceiling:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

No arbitration. Your right to sue for violations of your privacy shouldn't be waivable in a clickthrough agreement:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation

No "pay for privacy." Privacy is not a luxury good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the people who can least afford to buy private alternatives are most vulnerable to privacy abuses:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal

No tricks. Getting "consent" with confusing UIs and tiny fine print doesn't count:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/designing-welcome-mats-invite-user-privacy-0

A Privacy First approach doesn't merely help all the people harmed by surveillance, it also prevents the collateral damage that today's leading proposals create. For example, laws requiring services to force their users to prove their age ("to protect the kids") are a privacy nightmare. They're also unconstitutional and keep getting struck down.

A better way to improve the kid safety of the internet is to ban surveillance. A surveillance ban doesn't have the foreseeable abuses of a law like KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), like bans on information about trans healthcare, medication abortions, or banned books:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online

When it comes to the news, banning surveillance advertising would pave the way for a shift to contextual ads (ads based on what you're looking at, not who you are). That switch would change the balance of power between news organizations and tech platforms – no media company will ever know as much about their readers as Google or Facebook do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a news outlet's content as the publisher does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

This is a much better approach than the profit-sharing arrangements that are being trialed in Australia, Canada and France (these are sometimes called "News Bargaining Codes" or "Link Taxes"). Funding the news by guaranteeing it a share of Big Tech's profits makes the news into partisans for that profit – not the Big Tech watchdogs we need them to be. When Torstar, Canada's largest news publisher, struck a profit-sharing deal with Google, they killed their longrunning, excellent investigative "Defanging Big Tech" series.

A privacy law would also protect access to healthcare, especially in the post-Roe era, when Big Tech surveillance data is being used to target people who visit abortion clinics or secure medication abortions. It would end the practice of employers forcing workers to wear health-monitoring gadget. This is characterized as a "voluntary" way to get a "discount" on health insurance – but in practice, it's a way of punishing workers who refuse to let their bosses know about their sleep, fertility, and movements.

A privacy law would protect marginalized people from all kinds of digital discrimination, from unfair hiring to unfair lending to unfair renting. The commercial surveillance industry shovels endless quantities of our personal information into the furnaces that fuel these practices. A privacy law shuts off the fuel supply:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation

There are plenty of ways that AI will make our lives worse, but copyright won't fix it. For issues of labor exploitation (especially by creative workers), the answer lies in labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

And for many of AI's other harms, a muscular privacy law would starve AI of some of its most potentially toxic training data:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-updated-terms-to-use-customer-data-to-train-ai-2023-9

Meanwhile, if you're worried about foreign governments targeting Americans – officials, military, or just plain folks – a privacy law would cut off one of their most prolific and damaging source of information. All those lawmakers trying to ban Tiktok because it's a surveillance tool? What about banning surveillance, instead?

Monopolies and surveillance go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Some of the biggest tech empires were built on mountains of nonconsensually harvested private data – and they use that data to defend their monopolies. Legal privacy guarantees are a necessary precursor to data portability and interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Once we are guaranteed a right to privacy, lawmakers and regulators can order tech giants to tear down their walled gardens, rather than relying on tech companies to (selectively) defend our privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The point here isn't that privacy fixes all the internet's woes. The policy is "privacy first," not "just privacy." When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality. Privacy first! Then – everything else!

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/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

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

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

[catgirljaneway]

Voy + Textposts 17, Special ParisKim Showcase

(Voy + Textposts 16) + (Voy + Textposts 18)

[septic-salad]

"See ya 👹"

[legions-top-dog]

Helicopters fly over the Mojave towards the remaining NCR outposts. Sirens sound across the Mojave as the echoes of artillery and the roar of tanks disrupts the tranquil environment.

Dozens of freshly trained Legion paratroopers jump out over the outskirts of towns and cities while the Boomers' B29, part of 4 groups of three bombers each drop airbombs and mininukes on hastily made NCR reinforcements streaming out of their bases.

And the Divide finally erupts into flames, Ulysses' worst nightmare, as 5 lances of fire ascend into the sky and travel towards the NCR- two headed to Colorado and Dayglow, two others towards the Capital Wastes- Washington DC and Boston respectively. And one headed to Zion.

The Dam, a bastion of artillery fires dozens of shells an hour at Boulder City. The Pershing II with a new nuclear warhead sits at the heavily defended HELIOS ONE complex as new troops, tanks, artillery pieces and squads of men arrive by helicopter or truck.

Squads of NCR infantry are crippled by hidden landmines.

Hundreds of people suspected of engaging in debauchery, crime and or immorality are dragged out into the streets of the Strip, corralled into trucks and shot in fields.

A single Eagles B-52 looses a single megaton-class nuclear gravity bomb above the REPCONN plant.

Vulpes watches from the Sherman as the Mojave is dragged into the depths of war.

(Feel free to RP in this thread. It's here for a reason.)

@noomycatz

@a-fellow-courier

@yuro-skell

@fly-vertibirds-everyday

@powerfister

@galileo-of-the-legion

@thinktankbigmt

@atom-bombs-killed-the-radio-star

@okaybooner

@livelaughfantastic

@aleksei-of-newvegas

@bl4z33467467

@mojave-express2287

@sonofmarzzzz

[godsfavoritelitlesilly]

"I guess you're drowning down here too now?"

[denimdepression]

wait how are we at black ops 6??? i lost track for a second what happened did they just keep making them???

[usafphantom2]

New Zealand Air Force Douglas A-4 Skyhawk

@Destroye83 via X

[guigz1-coldwar]

The Faces of Lily

4K: https://deviantart.com/guigz1/art/The-Faces-of-Lily-1096905432…

Tagging: @efingart , @adlerboi

[mango-parfait]

Frank Woods practice because he's my wife <3

[dimeurz]

can you?

captain america: cold war incoming and i can’t help it 🫡

[lonestarbattleship]

USS NEW JERSEY (BB-62) during sea trials in the Pacific Ocean, prior to her recommissioning in January 1983.

Photographed by PH1 Harold Gerwien in September 1982.

NARA: 6369774

[itstherainbowstringsforme]

THE STORY OF US

she crossed her thoughtless heart spread her wings like a parachute

she’s the albatross she swept in at the rescue

she was there all along but our indie records were much cooler than hers

so she kept standing by and waiting at our backdoor All this time how could we not know?

'You belong with me, you belong with me Oh, I remember you driving to my house in the middle of the night I'm the one who makes you laugh when you know you're 'bout to cry I know your favorite songs and you tell me 'bout your dreams Think I know where you belong, think I know it's with me

Can't you see that I'm the one who understands you? Been here all along, so why can't you see? You belong with me Have you ever thought, just maybe You belong with me?

Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone I'll be waiting, all there's left to do is run You'll be the prince, and I'll be the princess It's a love story, baby, just say yes

Romeo, save me, they're trying to tell me how to feel This love is difficult, but it's real

Don't be afraid, we'll make it out of this mess It's a love story, baby, just say yes’

we’re on the bleachers  born to be suburban legends

great minds think alike cooler in theory But not if you force it to be and the skeletons in our closets plotted hard to fuck this up when you are young they assume you know nothing

too high a horse for a simple girl to rise above too impaired by her youth to know what to do

‘'who do I have to speak to About if they can redo The prophecy?'

THE LIGHTHOUSE FAMILY

they swept in at the rescue

- conversation with friend(s) - a long long time ago

‘to these mass coming out kids’ i was so used to being the narrator not including myself - looking from the outside in ‘saviour complex’ became a doctor telling other people that it would be okay because nobody had ever told me - it was my comfort structure there’s escape in escapism

the beginning of the end.

aaron dessner and justin vernon decided that they were going to break the cycle of sadness by letting a birdy sing songs for the tortured poets…

the most famous tortured poet

would make worlds collide function as a bridge

she took the night shift so that one day

there would be daylight

for all of us

the industry had plotted hard to make sure that our paths wouldn't cross. so they had to do something to make sure she would start floating in our orbits - change the system from within.

i'm the perfect example that their masterplan worked (if i'm not completely derailing and going off the grid) hi it's me sad smart queer emo 90’s kid (i know how to ball and i know aristotle) representation is key

we'll see

I keep going round and round on the same old circuit. A wire travels underground to a vacant lot. Where something I can't see interrupts the current. And shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot. And from behind the screen, it can look so perfect.

But it's not.

I'm always running from something I push it back, but it keeps on coming And being clever never got me very far

happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time It's miserable and magical but jesus chris, I'm so blue all the time and that's just how I feel always have and I always will i always have and always will

comfort is a construct i don't believe in good luck

I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind People need a key to get to The only one is mine I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child No mid-sized city hopes and small town fears I'm there most of the year Cause I hate it here I hate it here

So baby kiss me like a drug, like a respirator. And let me fall into the dream of the astronaut. Where I get lost in space that goes on forever. And you make all the rest just an after thought. And I believe it's you who could make it better. But it's not. No it's not

It’s time to sing a new song and chase the clouds away

——— keep the masses entertained and fed and make sure that the pop dolls are kept far away, away from where the culture is clever

this is not to tell a story about me or my life it shines a light on how fucked up society is

miley cyrus - wrecking ball - passed me by taylor - sorry girl - same

until...

they started to put narcotics

in pretty much everything

(spotify wrapped 2024 - taylor and miley 💯 both solid #1 en #2)

this is (one of) my essentials spotify lists it's funny cause it shows

how well the plan worked out (if this actually is a plan)

13 nov 2020 taylor swift enters the chat and life would never be the same again :)

no i'm staying 'cause baby WE are the New Romantics the best people in life are free

------- narcotics narcotics narcotics watch this be the real thing 👇

and i stand by it 'stupidity' you play stupid games you win stupid prizes 'Cause karma is the thunder Rattling your ground Karma's on your scent like a bounty hunter Karma's gonna track you down Step by step from town to town Sweet like justice, karma is a queen Karma takes all my friends to the summit

thanks karlie for never not being funny 😂 and for just being you i think this vlog is my favourite especially the part about trees

thanks taylor for being a lifeline 🔂 and the boss for being my lighthouse

birds of a feather we should stick together new anthem we've come a long way from 'hospital beds" to end up here 🙃

bye bye sphere

I thought this hell of a bumpy rollercoaster ride had me going from this 🎢

to this 🎡

now i see that it's actually bringing me back to this ☀️